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SANTA ANA PUBLIC LIBRARY
Santa Ana, California ^

PUBLISHED BY AUTHORITY OF THE
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS

Mont' Saint- Michel and Chartres

Chartres: The Tree of Jesse Window
(Upper part)

Mont- Saint- Michel
and Chartres

HENRY ADAMS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM

Illustrated

715^)6

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

OCT "i iC34

SANTA ANA

Public Library

SANTA ANA. CALIF.

7l(«

TWENTIETH IMPRESSION, MARCH, 1932

tCbt fiiuetaftie J0tt»»

CAMBRIDGE ■ MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

Editor's Note

FROM the moment when, through the courtesy of my friend Barrett
Wendell, I came first to know Mr. Henry Adams's book, Mo7it-
Saint-Michel and Chartres, I was profoundly convinced that this
privately printed, jealously guarded volume should be withdrawn
from its hiding-place amongst the bibliographical treasures of col-
lectors and amateurs and given that wide publicity demanded alike
by its intrinsic nature and the cause it could so admirably serve.

To say that the book was a revelation is inadequately to express
a fact; at once all the theology, philosophy, and mysticism, the poli-
tics, sociology, and economics, the romance, literature, and art of that
greatest epoch of Christian civilization became fused in the alembic
of an unique insight and precipitated by the dynamic force of a per-
sonal and distinguished style. A judgment that might well have been
biased by personal inclination received the endorsement of many in
two continents, more competent to pass judgment, better able to
speak with authority; and so fortified, I had the honour of saying
to Mr. Adams, in the autumn of 19 12, that the American Institute
of Architects asked the distinguished privilege of arranging for the
publication of an edition for general sale, under its own imprimatur.
The result is the volume now made available for public circulation.

In justice to Mr. Adams, it should be said that such publication
is, in his opinion, unnecessary and uncalled-for, a conclusion in
which neither the American Institute of Architects, the publishers,
nor the Editor concurs. Furthermore, the form in which the book is
presented is no affair of the author, who, in giving reluctant consent
to publication, expressly stipulated that he should have no part or
parcel in carrying out so mad a venture of faith, — as he estimated
the project of giving his book to the public.

vi EDITOR'S NOTE

In this, and for once, his judgment is at fault. Mont- Saint- Michel
and Chartres is one of the most distinguished contributions to litera-
ture and one of the most valuable adjuncts to the study of mediaeval-
ism America thus far has produced. The rediscovery of this great
epoch of Christian civilization has had issue in many and valuable works
on its religion, its philosophy, its economics, its politics, and its art,
but in nearly every instance, whichever field has been traversed has
been considered almost as an isolated phenomenon, with insufficient
reference to the other aspects of an era that was singularly united and
at one with itself. Hugh of Saint Victor and Saint Thomas Aquinas
are fully comprehensible only in their relationship to Saint Anselm,
Saint Bernard, and the development of Catholic dogma and life; feu-
dalism, the crusades, the guilds and communes weave themselves
into this same religious development and into the vicissitudes of cres-
cent nationalities; Dante, the cathedral builders, the painters, sculp-
tors, and music masters, all are closely knit into the warp and woof of
philosophy, statecraft, economics, and religious devotion; — indeed,
it may be said that the Middle Ages, more than any other recorded
epoch of history, must be considered en bloc, as a period of consistent
unity as highly emphasized as was its dynamic force.

It is unnecessary to say that Mr. Adams deals with the art of the
Middle Ages after this fashion: he is not of those who would deter-
mine every element in art from its material antecedents. He realizes
very fully that its essential element, the thing that differentiates it
from the art that preceded and that which followed, is its spiritual
impulse; the manifestation may have been, and probably was, more
or less accidental, but that which makes Chartres Cathedral and its
glass, the sculptures of Rheims, the Dies Irce, Aucassin and Nicolette,
the Song of Roland, the Arthurian Legends, great art and unique, is
neither their technical mastery nor their fidelity to the enduring laws
of all great art, — though these are singular in their perfection, —
but rather the peculiar spiritual impulse which informed the time, and

EDITOR'S NOTE vii

6y Its intensity, its penetrating power, and its dynamic force wrought
a rounded and complete civilization and manifested this through a
thousand varied channels.

Greater, perhaps, even than his grasp of the singular entirety of
mediaeval civilization, is Mr. Adams's power of merging himself in
a long dead time, of thinking and feeling with the men and women
thereof, and so breathing on the dead bones of antiquity that again
they clothe themselves with flesh and vesture, call back their sev-
ered souls, and live again, not only to the consciousness of the
reader, but before his very eyes. And it is not a thin simulacrum he
raises by some doubtful alchemy: it is no phantasm of the past that
shines dimly before us in these magical pages; it is the very time itself
in which we are merged. We forgather with the Abbot and his
monks, and the crusaders and pilgrims in the Shrine of the Arch-
angel : we pay our devoirs to the fair French Queens, — Blanche of
Castile, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mary of Champagne, — fighting their
battles for them as liege servants: we dispute with Abelard, Thomas of
Aquino, Duns the Scotsman: we take our parts in the Court of Love,
or sing the sublime and sounding praises of God with the Canons of
Saint Victor: our eyes opened at last, and after many days we kneel
before Our Lady of Pity, asking her intercession for her lax but loyal
devotees. Seven centuries dissolve and vanish away, being as they
were not, and the thirteenth century lives less for us than we live in
it and are a part of its gaiety and light-heartedness, its youthful
ardour and abounding action, its childlike simplicity and frankness,
its normal and healthy and all-embracing devotion.

And it is well for us to have this experience. Apart from the de-
sirable transformation it effects in preconceived and curiously erron-
eous superstitions as to one of the greatest eras in all history, it is
vastly heartening and exhilarating. If it gives new and not always
flattering standards for the judgment of contemporary men and things,
so does it establish new ideals, new goals for attainment. To live for

viii EDITOR'S NOTE

a day in a world that built Chartres Cathedral, even If it makes the
living in a world that creates the "Black Country" of England or an
Iron City of America less a thing of joy and gladness than before,
equally opens up the far prospect of another thirteenth century in the
times that are to come and urges to ardent action toward its attain-
ment.

But apart from this, the deepest value of Mont-Saint- Michel and
Chartres, its importance as a revelation of the eternal glory of mediae-
val art and the elements that brought it into being is not lightly to
be expressed. To every artist, whatever his chosen form of expression,
it must appear unique and invaluable, and to none more than the
architect, who, familiar at last with its beauties, its power, and its
teaching force, can only applaud the action of the American In-
stitute of Architects in making Mr. Adams an Honorary Member, as
one who has rendered distinguished services to the art, and voice his
gratitude that it has brought the book within his reach and given it
publicity before the world.

Whitehall,
Sudbury, Massachusetts,
June, 1913. •

Contents

Preface xiii

I. Saint Michiel de la Mer del Peril . . . . i
II. La Chanson de Roland 14

III. The Merveille 32

IV. Normandy and the Ile de France 46

V. Towers and Portals 62

VI. The Virgin of Chartres 89

VII. Roses and Apses 106

VIII. The Twelfth-Century Glass 128

IX. The Legendary Windows 149

X. The Court of the Queen of Heaven .... 179

XL The Three Queens 198

XII. Nicolette and Marion 230

XIII. Les Miracles de Notre Dame 251

XIV. Abelard 285

XV. The Mystics 320

XVI. Saint Thomas Aquinas 347

Index 385

Illustrations

Chartres: The Tree of Jesse Window (upper part) (p. 127)

Colored Frontispiece

Mont-Saint-Michel 2

Mont-Saint-Michel: The Hall of the Knights ... 24

Mont-Saint-Michel: The Refectory 34

CouTANCEs Cathedral 46

Caen: The "Abba ye aux Dames" 58

Chartres Cathedral 62

Chartres : Detail of West Portal 70

Chartres: The North Porch 78

Chartres: The South Porch 86

Chartres: The Nave no

Chartres: The Prodigal Son Window 174

Saint Thomas Aquinas 348

Preface

(December, 1904.I

Some old Elizabethan play or poem contains the lines: —

. . . Who reads me, when I am ashes.
Is my son in wishes

The relationship, between reader and writer, of son and father, may
have existed in Queen Elizabeth's time, but is much too close to be
true for ours. The utmost that any writer could hope of his readers
now is that they should consent to regard themselves as nephews, and
even then he would expect only a more or less civil refusal from most
of them. Indeed, if he had reached a certain age, he would have
observed that nephews, as a social class, no longer read at all, and that
there is only one familiar instance recorded of a nephew who read his
uncle. The exception tends rather to support the rule, since it needed
a Macaulay to produce, and two volumes to record it. Finally, the
metre does not permit it. One may not say: "Who reads me, when I
am ashes, is my nephew in wishes."

The same objections do not apply to the word " niece." The change
restores the verse, and, to a very great degree, the fact. Nieces have
been known to read in early youth, and in some cases may have read
their uncles. The relationship, too, is convenient and easy, capable of
being anything or nothing, at the will of either party, like a Moham-
medan or Polynesian or American marriage. No valid objection can
be offered to this change in the verse. Niece let it be !

The following pages, then, are written for nieces, or for those who
are willing, for the time, to be nieces in wish. For convenience of

xiv PREFACE

travel in France, where hotels, in out-of-the-way places, are some-
times wanting in space as well as luxury, the nieces shall count as one
only. As many more may come as like, but one niece is enough for the
uncle to talk to, and one niece is much more likely than two to listen.
One niece is also more likely than two to carry a kodak and take inter-
est in it, since she has nothing else, except her uncle, to interest her, and
instances occur when she takes interest neither in the uncle nor in the
journey. One cannot assume, even in a niece, too emotional a nature,
but one may assume a kodak.

The party, then, with such variations of detail as may suit its tastes,
has sailed from New York, let us say, early in June for an entire sum-
mer in France. One pleasant June morning it has landed at Cherbourg
or Havre and takes the train across Normandy to Pontorson, where,
with the evening light, the tourists drive along the chaussee, over the
sands or through the tide, till they stop at Madame Poulard's famous
hotel within the Gate of the Mount.

The uncle talks: —

Mont'Saint- Michel and Chartres

CHAPTER I

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL

THE Archangel loved heights. Standing on the summit of the
tower that crowned his church, wings upspread, sword uplifted,
the devil crawling beneath, and the cock, symbol of eternal vigilance,
perched on his mailed foot, Saint Michael held a place of his own in
heaven and on earth which seems, in the eleventh century, to leave
hardly room for the Virgin of the Crypt at Chartres, still less for
the Beau Christ of the thirteenth century at Amiens. The Archangel
stands for Church and State, and both militant. He is the conqueror
of Satan, the mightiest of all created spirits, the nearest to God. His
place was where the danger was greatest; therefore you find him here.
For the same reason he was, while the pagan danger lasted, the patron
saint of France. So the Normans, when they were converted to Chris-
tianity, put 'themsel ves under his powerful protection. So he stood
for centuries on his Mount in Peril of the Sea, watching across the
tremor of the immense ocean, — immensi tremor oceani, — as Louis XI,
inspired for once to poetry, inscribed on the collar of the Order of
Saint Michael which he created. So soldiers, nobles, and monarchs
went on pilgrimage to his shrine; so the common people followed, and
still follow, like ourselves.

The church stands high on the summit of this granite rock, and on
its west front is the platform, to which the tourist ought first to climb.
From the edge of this platform, the eye plunges down, two hundred
and thirty-five feet, to the wide sands or the wider ocean, as the tides
recede or advance, under an infinite sky, over a restless sea, which
even we tourists can understand and feel without books or guides; but

2 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

when we turn from the western view, and look at the church door,
thirty or forty yards from the parapet where we stand, one needs to be
eight centuries old to know what this mass of encrusted architecture
meant to its builders, and even then one must still learn to feel it. The
man who wanders into the twelfth century is lost, unless he can grow
prematurely young.

One can do it, as one can play with children. Wordsworth, whose
practical sense equalled his intuitive genius, carefully limited us to "a
season of calm weather," which is certainly best; but granting a fair
frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal sea" which
brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even travel
thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense is par-
tially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least in old people,
who alone, as a class, have the time to be young.

One needs only to be old enough in order to be as young as one
will. From the top of this Abbey Church one looks across the bay to
Avranches, and towards Coutances and the Cotentin, — the Constan-
tinus pagus, — whose shore, facing us, recalls the coast of New Eng-
land. The relation between the granite of one coast and that of the
other may be fanciful, but the relation between the people who live on
each is as hard and practical a fact as the granite itself. When one
enters the church, one notes first the four great triumphal piers or
columns, at the intersection of the nave and transepts, and on looking
into M. Corroyer's architectural study which is the chief source of all
one's acquaintance with the Mount, one learns that these piers were
constructed in 1058. Four out of five American tourists will instantly
recall the only date of mediaeval history they ever knew, the date of
the Norman Conquest. Eight years after these piers were built, in
1066, Duke William of Normandy raised an army of forty thousand
men in these parts, and in northern France, whom he took to England,
where they mostly stayed. For a hundred and fifty years, until 1204,
Normandy and England were united ; the Norman peasant went freely

w
w

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL 3

to England with his lord, spiritual or temporal; the Norman woman,
a very capable person, followed her husband or her parents; Normans
held nearly all the English fiefs; filled the English Church ; crowded the
English Court; created the English law; and we know that French was
still currently spoken in England as late as 1400, or thereabouts, "After
the scole of Stratford atte bo we." The aristocratic Norman names
still survive in part, and if we look up their origin here we shall gener-
ally find them in villages so remote and insignificant that their place
can hardly be found on any ordinary map; but the common people had
no surnames, and cannot be traced, although for every noble whose
name or blood survived in England or in Normandy, we must reckon
hundreds of peasants. Since the generation which followed William to
England in 1066, we can reckon twenty-eight or thirty from father to
son, and, if you care to figure up the sum, you will find that you had
about two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors living in
the middle of the eleventh century. The whole population of England
and northern France may then have numbered five million, but if it
were fifty it would not much affect the certainty that, if you have
any English blood at all, you have also Norman. If we could go back
and live again in all our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical
ancestors of the eleventh century, we should find ourselves doing many
surprising things, but among the rest we should pretty certainly be
ploughing most of the fields of the Cotentin and Calvados; going to
mass in every parish church in Normandy; rendering military service
to every lord, spiritual or temporal, in all this region; and helping to
build the Abbey Church at Mont-Saint-Michel. From the roof of the
Cathedral of Coutances over yonder, one may look away over the hills
and woods, the farms and fields of Normandy, and so familiar, so
Lomelike are they, one can almost take oath that in this, or the other,
or in all, one knew life once and has never so fully known it since.

Never so fully known it since! For we of the eleventh century, hard-
headed, close-fisted, grasping, shrewd, as we were,. and as Normans

4 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

are still said to be, stood more fully in the centre of the world's move-
ment than our English descendants ever did. We were a part, and a
great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe. The Leos and
Gregories of the tenth and eleventh centuries leaned on us in their
great struggle for reform. Our Duke Richard-Sans-Peur, in 966,
turned the old canons out of the Mount in order to bring here the
highest influence of the time, the Benedictine monks of Monte Cas-
sino. Richard II, grandfather of William the Conqueror, began this
Abbey Church in 1020, and helped Abbot Hildebert to build it. When
William the Conqueror in 1066 set out to conquer England, Pope
Alexander II stood behind him and blessed his banner. From that
moment our Norman Dukes cast the Kings of France into the shade.
Our activity was not limited to northern Europe, or even confined by
Anjou and Gascony. When we stop at Coutances, we will drive out to
Hauteville to see where Tancred came from, whose sons Robert and
Roger were conquering Naples and Sicily at the time when the Abbey
Church was building on the Mount. Normans were everywhere in
1066, and everywhere in the lead of their age. We were a serious race.
If you want other proof of it, besides our record in war and in politics,
you have only to look at our art. Religious art is the measure of
human depth and sincerity; any triviality, any weakness, cries aloud.
If this church on the Mount is not proof enough of Norman character,
we will stop at Coutances for a wider view. Then we will go to Caen
and Bayeux. From there, it would almost be worth our while to leap
at once to Palermo. It was in the year 1131 or thereabouts that Roger
began the Cathedral at Cefalu and the Chapel Royal at Palermo ; it was
about the year 11 74 that his grandson William began the Cathedral of
Monreale. No art — either Greek or Byzantine, Italian or Arab — has
ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impress-
ive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel watching over its
northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange
and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL 5

Down nearly to the end of the twelfth century the Norman was
fairly master of the world in architecture as in arms, although the
thirteenth century belonged to France, and we must look for its
glories on the Seine and Marne and Loire; but for the present we are in
the eleventh century, — tenants of the Duke or of the Church or of
small feudal lords who take their names from the neighbourhood, —
Beaumont, Carteret, Greville, Percy, Pierpont, — who, at the Duke's
bidding, will each call out his tenants, perhaps ten men-at-arms with
their attendants, to fight in Brittany, or in the Vexin toward Paris, or
on the great campaign for the conquest of England which is to come
within ten years, — the greatest military effort that has been made
in western Europe since Charlemagne and Roland were defeated
at Roncesvalles three hundred years ago. For the moment, we are
helping to quarry granite for the Abbey Church, and to haul it to the
Mount, or load it on our boat. We never fail to make our annual
pilgrimage to the Mount on the Archangel's Day, October 16, We
expect to be called out for a new campaign which Duke William
threatens against Brittany, and we hear stories that Harold the Saxon,
the powerful Earl of Wessex in England, is a guest, or, as some say,
a prisoner or a hostage, at the Duke's Court, and will go with us on
the campaign. The year is 1058. i<

All this time we have been standing on the parvis, looking out over
the sea and sands which are as good eleventh-century landscape as
they ever were; or turning at times towards the church door which is
the pons seclorum, the bridge of ages, between us and our ancestors.
Now that we have made an attempt, such as it is, to get our minds into
a condition to cross the bridge without breaking down in the effort, we
enter the church and stand face to face with eleventh-century archi-
tecture; a ground-plan which dates from 1020; a central tower, or its
piers, dating from 1058; and a church completed in 1135. France can
offer few buildings of this importance equally old, with dates so exact.
Perhaps the closest parallel to Mont-Saint- Michel is Saint-Benoit-sur«

6 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Loire, above Orleans, which seems to have been a shrine almost as
popular as the Mount, at the same time. Chartres was also a famous
shrine, but of the Virgin, and the west porch of Chartres, which is to
be our peculiar pilgrimage, was a hundred years later than the ground-
plan of Mont-Saint-Michel, although Chartres porch is the usual
starting-point of northern French art. Queen Matilda's Abbaye-aux-
Dames, now the Church of the Trinity, at Caen, dates from 1066.
Saint Semin at Toulouse, the porch of the Abbey Church at Moissac,
Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont, the Abbey Church at Vezelay, are
all said to be twelfth-century. Even San Marco at Venice was new in
1020.

Yet in 1020 Norman art was already too ambitious. Certainly nine
hundred years leave their traces on granite as well as on other material.
but the granite of Abbot Hildebert would have stood securely enough,
if the Abbot had not asked too much from it. Perhaps he asked too
much from the Archangel, for the thought of the Archangel's superior-
ity was clearly the inspiration of his plan. The apex of the granite rock
rose like a sugar-loaf two hundred and forty feet (73.6 metres) above
mean sea-level. Instead of cutting the summit away to give his church
a secure rock foundation, which would have sacrificed about thirty
feet of height, the Abbot took the apex of the rock for his level, and on
all sides built out foundations of masonry to support the walls of his
church. The apex of the rock is the floor of the croisee, the intersection
of nave and transept. On this solid foundation the Abbot rested the
chief weight of the church, which was the central tower, supported by
the four great piers which still stand ; but from the croisee in the centre
westward to the parapet of the platform, the Abbot filled the whole
space with masonry, and his successors built out still farther, until
some two hundred feet of stonework ends now in a perpendicular wall
of eighty feet or more. In this space are several ranges of chambers,
but the structure might perhaps have proved strong enough to support
the light Romanesque front which was usual in the eleventh century,

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL 7

had not fashions in architecture changed in the great epoch of build-
ing, a hundred and fifty years later, when Abbot Robert de Torigny
thought proper to reconstruct the west front, and build out two towers
on its flanks. The towers were no doubt beautiful, if one may judge
from the towers of Bayeux and Coutances, but their weight broke
down the vaulting beneath, and one of them fell in 1300. In 1618 the
whole fagade began to give way, and in 1776 not only the fagade but
also three of the seven spans of the nave were pulled down. Of Abbot
Hildebert's nave, only four arches remain.

Still, the overmastering strength of the eleventh century is stamped
on a great scale here, not only in the four spans of the nave, and in the
transepts, but chiefly in the triumphal columns of the croisee. No one
is likely to forget what Norman architecture was, who takes the
trouble to pass once through this fragment of its earliest bloom. The
dimensions are not great, though greater than safe construction war-
ranted. Abbot Hildebert's whole church did not exceed two hundred
and thirty feet in length in the interior, and the span of the triumphal
arch was only about twenty-three feet, if the books can be trusted.
The nave of the Abbaye-aux- Dames appears to have about the same
width, and probably neither of them was meant to be vaulted. The
roof was of timber, and about sixty-three feet high at its apex. Com-
pared with the great churches of the thirteenth century, this build-
ing is modest, but its size is not what matters to us. Its style is the
starting-point of all our future travels. Here is your first eleventh-
century church! How does it affect you?

Serious and simple to excess! is it not? Young people rarely enjoy
it. They prefer the Gothic, even as you see it here, looking at us from
the choir, through the great Norman arch. No doubt they are right,
since they are young : but men and women who have lived long and are
tired, — who want rest, — who have done with aspirations and ambi-
tion, — whose life has been a broken arch, — feel this repose and self-
restraint as they feel nothing else. The quiet strength of these curved

8 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

lines, the solid support of these heavy columns, the moderate propor^
tions, even the modified lights, the absence of display, of eflfort, of self-
consciousness, satisfy them as no other art does. They come back to
it to rest, after a long circle of pilgrimage, — the cradle of rest from
which their ancestors started. Even here they find the repose none too
deep.

Indeed, when you look longer at it, you begin to doubt whether
there is any repose in it at all, — whether it is not the most unrepose-
ful thought ever put into architectural form. Perched on the extreme
point of this abrupt rock, the Church Militant with its aspirant Arch-
angel stands high above the world, and seems to threaten heaven itself.
The idea is the stronger and more restless because the Church of Saint
Michael is surrounded and protected by the world and the society over
which it rises, as Duke William rested on his barons and their men
Neither the Saint nor the Duke was troubled by doubts about his
mission. Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one
at Mont-Saint-Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his
own way, or to stand guard for each other. Neither Church nor State
is intellectual, or learned, or even strict in dogma. Here we do not feel
the Trinity at all; the Virgin but little; Christ hardly more; we feel
only the Archangel and the Unity of God. We have little logic here,
and simple faith, but we have energy. We cannot do many things
which are done in the centre of civilization, at Byzantium, but we can
fight, and we can build a church. No doubt we think first of the
church, and next of our temporal lord; only in the last instance do we
think of our private aflfairs, and our private affairs sometimes suffer
for it; but we reckon the affairs of Church and State to be ours, too,
and we carry this idea very far. Our church on the Mount is ambi-
tious, restless, striving for effect; our conquest of England, with which
the Duke is infatuated, is more ambitious still; but all this is a trifle
to the outburst which is coming in the next generation; and Saint
Michael on his Mount expresses it all.

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL 9

Taking architecture as an expression of energy, we can some day
compare Mont-Saint-Michel with Beauvais, and draw from the com
parison whatever moral suits our frame of mind ; but you should first
note that here, in the eleventh century, the Church, however simple-
minded or unschooled, was not cheap. Its self-respect is worth notic-
ing, because it was short-lived in its art. Mont-Saint- Michel, through-
out, even up to the delicate and intricate stonework of its cloisters, is
built of granite. The crypts and substructures are as well constructed
as the surfaces most exposed to view. When we get to Chartres, which
is largely a twelfth-century work, you will see that the cathedral
there, too, is superbly built, of the hardest and heaviest stone within
reach, which has nowhere settled or given way; while, beneath, you
will find a cr>'pt that rivals the church above. The thirteenth century
did not build so. The great cathedrals after 1200 show economy,
and sometimes worse. The world grew cheap, as worlds must.

You may like it all the better for being less serious, less heroic, less
militant, and more what the French call bourgeois, just as you may like
the style of Louis XV better than that of Louis XIV, — Madame du
Barry better than Madame de Montespan, — for taste is free, and all
styles are good which amuse; but since we are now beginning with the
earliest, in order to step down gracefully to the stage, whatever it is,
where you prefer to stop, we must try to understand a little of the
kind of energy which Norman art expressed, or would have expressed
if it had thought in our modes. The only word which describes the
Norman style is the French word natf. Littre says that naif comes
from natif, as vulgar comes from vulgus, as though native traits must be
simple, and commonness must be vulgar. Both these derivative mean-
ings were strange to the eleventh century. Naivete was simply natural
and vulgarity was merely coarse. Norman naivete was not different
in kind from the naivete of Burgundy or Gascony or Lombardy, but
it was slightly different in expression, as you will see when you travel
south. Here at Mont-Saint-Michel we have only a mutilated trunk of

lo MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

an eleventh-century church to judge by. We have not even a facade,
and shall have to stop at some Norman village — at Thaon or Ouistre
ham — to find a west front which might suit the Abbey here, but
wherever we find it we shall find something a little more serious, more
military, and more practical than you will meet in other Romanesque
work, farther south. So, too, the central tower or lantern — the most
striking feature of Norman churches — has fallen here at Mont-Saint-
Michel, and we shall have to replace it from Cerisy-la-Foret, and
Lessay, and Falaise. We shall find much to say about the value of the
lantern on a Norman church, and the singular power it expresses. We
shall have still more to say of the towers which flank the west front of
Norman churches, but these are mostly twelfth-century, and will lead
us far beyond Coutances and Bayeux, homfl^he to fleche, till we come
to the fleche of all fleches, at Chartres.

We shall have a whole chapter of study, too, over the eleventh-
century apse, but here at Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbot Hildebert's choir
went the way of his nave and tower. He built out even more boldly to
the east than to the west, and although the choir stood for some four
hundred years, which is a sufficient life for most architecture, the
foundations gave way at last, and it fell in 1421, in the midst of the
English wars, and remained a ruin until 1450. Then it was rebuilt,
a monument of the last days of the Gothic, so that now, standing at
the western door, you can look down the church, and see the two
limits of mediaeval architecture married together, — the earliest Nor-
man and the latest French. Through the Romanesque arches of 1058,
you look into the exuberant choir of latest Gothic, finished in 1521.
Although the two structures are some five hundred years apart, they
live pleasantly together. The Gothic died gracefully in France. The
choir is charming, — far more charming than the nave, as the beauti-
ful woman is more charming than the elderly man. One need not quar-
rel about styles of beauty, as long as the man and woman are evidently
satisfied and love and admire each other still, with all the solidity of

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL ii

faith to hold them up; but, at least, one cannot help seeing, as ono
looks from the older to the younger style, that whatever the woman's
sixteenth-century charm may be, it is not the man's eleventh-century
trait of naivete; — far from it! The simple, serious, silent dignity and
energy of the eleventh century have gone. Something more compli-
cated stands in their place; graceful, self-conscious, rhetorical, and
beautiful as perfect rhetoric, with its clearness, light, and line, and the
wealth of tracery that verges on the florid.

The crypt of the same period, beneath, is almost finer still, and even
in seriousness stands up boldly by the side of the Romanesque; but we
have no time to run off into the sixteenth century: we have still to
learn the alphabet of art in France. One must live deep into the
. eleventh century in order to understand the twelfth, and even after
passing years in the twelfth, we shall find the thirteenth in many ways
a world of its own, with a beauty not always inherited, and sometimes
not bequeathed. At the Mount we can go no farther into the eleventh
as far as concerns architecture. We shall have to follow the Roman-
esque to Caen and so up the Seine to the He de France, and across to
the Loire and the Rhone, far to the South where its home lay. All the
other eleventh-century work has been destroyed here or built over,
except at one point, on the level of the splendid crypt we just turned
from, called the Gros Piliers, beneath the choir.

There, according to M. Corroyer, in a corner between great con-
structions of the twelfth century and the vast Merveille of the thir-
teenth, the old refectory of the eleventh was left as a passage from one
group of buildings to the other. Below it is the kitchen of Hildebert.
Above, on the level of the church, was the dormitory. These eleventh-
century abbatial buildings faced north and west, and are close to the
present parvis, opposite the last arch of the nave. The lower levels of
Hildebert's plan served as supports or buttresses to the church above
and must therefore be older than the nave; probably older than the
triumphal piers of 1058.

12 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Hildebert planned them in 1020, and died after carrying his plans
out so far that they could be completed by Abbot Ralph de Beau-
mont, who was especially selected by Duke William in 1048, "more for
his high birth than for his merits." Ralph de Beaumont died in 1060,
and was succeeded by Abbot Ranulph, an especial favourite of Duchess
Matilda, and held in high esteem by Duke William. The list of names
shows how much social importance was attributed to the place. The
Abbot's duties included that of entertainment on a great scale. The
Mount was one of the most famous shrines of northern Europe. We
are free to take for granted that all the great people of Normandy slept
at the Mount and, supposing M. Corroyer to be right, that they dined
in this room, between 1050, when the building must have been in use,
down to 1 1 22 when the new abbatial quarters were built.

How far the monastic rules restricted social habits is a matter for
antiquaries to settle if they can, and how far those rules were observed
in the case of great secular princes; but the eleventh century was not
very strict, and the rule of the Benedictines was always mild, until the
Cistercians and Saint Bernard stiffened its discipline toward 1120.
Even then the Church showed strong leanings toward secular poetry
and popular tastes. The drama belonged to it almost exclusively, and
the Mysteries and Miracle plays which were acted under its patronage
often contained nothing of religion except the miracle. The greatest
poem of the eleventh century was the "Chanson de Roland," and of
that the Church took a sort of possession. At Chartres we shall find
Charlemagne and Roland dear to the Virgin, and at about the same
time, as far away as at Assisi in the Perugian country, Saint Francis
himself — the nearest approach the Western world ever made to an
Oriental incarnation of the divine essence — loved the French ro-
mans, and typified himself in the " Chanson de Roland." With Mont-
Saint-Michel, the "Chanson de Roland" is almost one. The "Chan-
son" is in poetry what the Mount is in architecture. Without the
"Chanson," one cannot approach the feeling which the eleventh

SAINT MICHIEL DE LA MER DEL PERIL 13

century built into the Archangel's church. Probably there was never
a day, certainly never a week, during several centuries, when portions
of the "Chanson" were not sung, or recited, at the Mount, and if
there was one room where it was most at home, this one, supposing it
to be the old refectory, claims to be the place.

CHAPTER II

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND

Molz pelerins qui vunt al Munt
Enquierent molt e grant dreit unt
Comment I'igliese fut fiindee
Premierement et estoree.
Cil qui lor dient de I'estoire
Que cil demandent en memoire
Ne I'unt pas bien ainz vunt faillant
En plusors leus e mespernant.
Por faire la apertement
Entendre a eels qui escient
N'unt de clerzie I'a tornee
De latin tote et ordenee
Pars veirs romieus novelement
Molt en segrei por son convent
Una jovencels moine est del Munt
Deus en son reigne part li dunt.
Guillaume a non de Saint Paier
Cen vei escrit en cest quaier.
El tens Robeirt de Torignie
Fut cil romanz fait e trove.

Most pilgrims who come to the Mount

Enquire much and are quite right,

How the church was foimded

At first, and established.

Those who tell them the story

That they ask, in memory

Have it not well, but fall in error

In many places, and misapprehension.

In order to make it clearly

Intelligible to those who have

No knowledge of letters, it has been turned

From the Latin, and wholly rendered

In Romanesque verses, newly.

Much in secret, for his convent.

By a youth ; a monk he is of the Mount.

God in his kingdom grant him part!

WilUam is his name, of Saint Pair

As is seen written in this book.

In the time of Robert of Torigny

Was this roman made and invented.

THESE verses begin the "Roman du Mont-Saint-Michel," and
if the spelling is corrected, they still read almost as easily as
Voltaire; more easily than Verlaine; and much like a nursery rhyme;
but as tourists cannot stop to clear their path, or smooth away the
pebbles, they must be lifted over the rough spots, even when roughness
is beauty. Translation is an evil, chiefly because every one who cares
for mediaeval architecture cares for mediaeval French, and ought to
care still more for mediaeval English. The language of this " Roman "
was the literary language of England. William of Saint-Pair was a
subject of Henry II, King of England and Normandy; his verses, like
those of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, are monuments of English literature.
To this day their ballad measure is better suited to English than to

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND 15

French; even the words and idioms are more English than French.
Any one who attacks them boldly will find that the "vers romieus"
run along like a ballad, singing their own meaning, and troubling
themselves very little whether the meaning is exact or not. One's
translation is sure to be full of gross blunders, but the supreme blunder
is that of translating at all when one is trying to catch not a fact
but a feeling. If translate one must, we had best begin by trying
to be literal, under protest that it matters not a straw whether we
succeed. Twelfth-century art was not precise; still less "precieuse,"
like Moliere's famous seventeenth-century prudes.

The verses of the young monk, William, who came from the little
Norman village of Saint-Pair, near Granville, within sight of the
Mount, were verses not meant to be brilliant. Simple human oeings
like rhyme better than prose, though both may say the same thing,
as they like a curved line better than a straight one, or a blue better
than a grey; but, apart from the sensual appetite, they chose rhyme in
creating their literature for the practical reason that they remembered
it better than prose. Men had to carry their libraries in their heads.

These lines of William, beginning his story, are valuable because
for once they give a name and a date. Abbot Robert of Torigny ruled
at the Mount from 11 54 to 1186. We have got to travel again and
again between Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres during these years,
but for the moment we must hurry to get back to William the Con-
queror and the "Chanson de Roland." William of Saint-Pair comes in
here, out of place, only on account of a pretty description he gave of the
annual pilgrimage to the Mount, which is commonly taken to be more
or less like what he saw every year on the Archangel's Day, and what
had existed ever since the Normans became Christian in 912: —

Li jorz iert clers e sanz grant vent. The day was dear, without much wind.

Les meschines e les vallez The maidens and the varlets

Chascuns d'els dist verz ou sonnez. Each of them said verse or song;

Neis li viellart revunt chantant Even the old people go singing;

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

De leece funt tuit semblant.
Qui plus ne seit si chante outree
E Dex ate u Asusee.
Cil jugleor la u il vunt
Tuit lor vieles traites unt
Laiz et sonnez vunt vielant.

Li tens est beals la joie est grant.
Cil palefrei a cil destrier
E cil roncin e cil sommier
Qui errouent par le chemin
Que menouent cil pelerin
De totes parz henissant vunt
For la grant joie que il unt.
Neis par les bois chantouent tuit
Li oiselet grant et petit.

Li buef les vaches vunt tnuant
Par les forez e repaissant.
Cors e boisines e fresteals
E fleutes e chalemeals
Sonnoent si que les montaignes
En retintoent et les pleignes.
Que esteit dont les plaiseiz
E des forez e des larriz.
En eels par a tel sonneiz
Com si ce fust cers acolliz.

Entor le mont el bois foUu
Cil travetier unt tres tendu
Rues unt fait par les chemins.
Plentei i out de divers vins
Pain e pastez fruit e poissons
Oisels obleies veneisons
De totes parz aveit a vendre
Assez en out qui ad que tendre.

All have a look of joy.
Who knows no more sings Hurrah,
Or God help, or Up and On I
The minstrels there where they go
Have all brought their viols;
Lays and songs playing as they go.

The weather is fine; the joy is great;

The palfreys and the chargers,

And the hackneys and the packhorses

Which wander along the road

That the pilgrims follow,

On all sides neighing go.

For the great joy they feel.

Even in the woods sing all

The Uttle birds, big and small.

The oxen and the cows go lowing

Through the forests as they feed.

Horns and trumpets and shepherd's pipes

And flutes and pipes of reed

Sound so that the mountains

Echo to them, and the plains.

How was it then with the glades

And with the forests and the pastures?

In these there was such sound

As though it were a stag at bay.

About the Mount, in the leafy wood,
The workmen have tents set up;
Streets have made along the roads.
Plenty there was of divers wines,
Bread and pasties, fruit and fish,
Birds, cakes, venison,
Everywhere there was for sale.
Enough he had who has the means to pay.

If you are not satisfied with this translation, any scholar of French
will easily help to make a better, for we are not studying grammar or
archaeology, and would rather be inaccurate in such matters than not,
if, at that price, a freer feeling of the art could be caught. Better still,
you can turn to Chaucer, who wrote his Canterbury Pilgrimage two
hundred years afterwards: —

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND ij

Whanne that April with his shoures sote

The droughte of March hath perced to the rote . . .

Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages

And palmeres for to seken strange strondes . . .

And especially, from every shires ende

Of Englelonde, to Canterbury they wende

The holy blisful martyr for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.

The passion for pilgrimages was universal among our ancestors as far
back as we can trace them. For at least a thousand years it was their
chief delight, and is not yet extinct. To feel the art of Mont-Saint-
Michel and Chartres we have got to become pilgrims again: but, just,
now, the point of most interest is not the pilgrim so much as the min-
strel who sang to amuse him, — the jugleor or jongleur, — who was at
home in every abbey, castle or cottage, as well as at every shrine. The
jugleor became a jongleur and degenerated into the street-juggler; the
minstrel, or menestrier, became very early a word of abuse, equivalent
to blackguard ; and from the beginning the profession seems to have
been socially decried, like that of a music-hall singer or dancer in
later times; but in the eleventh century, or perhaps earlier still, the
jongleur seems to have been a poet, and to have composed the songs he
sang. The immense mass of poetry known as the " Chansons de Geste "
seems to have been composed as well as sung by the unnamed Homers
of France, and of all spots in the many provinces where the French
language in its many dialects prevailed, Mont-Saint-Michel should
have been the favourite with the jongleur, not only because the swarms
of pilgrims assured him food and an occasional small piece of silver, but
also because Saint Michael was the saint militant of all the warriors
whose exploits in war were the subject of the "Chansons de Geste."
William of Saint- Pair was a priest-poet; he was not a minstrel, and his
"Roman "was not a chanson; it was made to read, not to recite; but
the "Chanson de Roland" was a different affair.

So it was, too, with William's contemporaries and rivals or prede-
cessors, the monumental poets of Norman-English literature. Wace,

i8 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

whose rhymed history of the Norman dukes, which he called the
"Roman de Rou," or "Rollo," is an English classic of the first rank,
was a canon of Bayeux when William of Saint-Pair was writing at
Mont-Saint-Michel. His rival Benoist, who wrote another famous
chronicle on the same subject, was also a historian, and not a singer.
In that day literature meant verse; elegance in French prose did not
yet exist; but the elegancies of poetry in the twelfth century were as
different, in kind, from the grand style of the eleventh, as Virgil was
different from Homer.

William of Saint- Pair introduces us to the pilgrimage and to the
jongleur, as they had existed at least two hundred years before his time,
and were to exist two hundred years after him. Of all our two hundred
and fifty million arithmetical ancestors who were going on pilgrimages
in the middle of the eleventh century, the two who would probably
most interest every one, after eight hundred years have passed, would
be William the Norman and Harold the Saxon. Through William of
Saint-Pair and Wace and Benoist, and the most charming literary
monument of all, the Bayeux tapestry of Queen Matilda, we can build
up the story of such a pilgrimage which shall be as historically exact as
the battle of Hastings, and as artistically true as the Abbey Church.

According to Wace's "Roman de Rou," when Harold's father. Earl
Godwin, died, April 15, 1053, Harold wished to obtain the release of
certain hostages, a brother and a cousin, whom Godwin had given to
Edward the Confessor as security for his good behaviour, and whom
Edward had sent to Duke William for safe-keeping. Wace took the
story from other and older sources, and its accuracy is much disputed,
but the fact that Harold went to Normandy seems to be certain, and
you will see at Bayeux the picture of Harold asking permission of
King Edward to make the journey, and departing on horseback, with
his hawk and hounds and followers, to take ship at Bosham, near
Chichester and Portsmouth. The date alone is doubtful. Common
sense seems to suggest that the earliest possible date could not be too

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND 19

early to explain the rash youth of the aspirant to a throne who put
himself in the power of a rival in the eleventh century. When that
rival chanced to be William the Bastard, not even boyhood could ex-
cuse the folly; but Mr. Freeman, the chief authority on this delicate
subject, inclined to think that Harold was forty years old when he
committed his blunder, and that the year was about 1064. Between
1054 and 1064 the historian is free to choose what year he likes, and
the tourist is still freer. To save trouble for the memory, the year 1058
will serve, since this is the date of the triumphal arches of the Abbey
Church on the Mount. Harold, in sailing from the neighbourhood of
Portsmouth, must have been bound for Caen or Rouen, but the usual
west winds drove him eastward till he was thrown ashore on the coast
of Ponthieu, between Abbeville and Boulogne, where he fell into the
hands of the Count of Ponthieu, from whom he was rescued or ran-
somed by Duke William of Normandy and taken to Rouen. Accord-
ing to Wace and the "Roman de Rou": —

Guillaume tint Heraut maint jour William kept Harold many a day,

Si com il dut a grant enor. As was his due in great honour.

A maint riche torneiement To many a rich tournament

Le fist aller mult noblement. Made him go very nobly.

Chevals e armes li dona Horses and arms gave him

Et en Bretaigne le mena And into Brittany led him

Ne sai de veir treiz faiz ou quatre I know not truly whether three or four times

Quant as Bretons se dut combattre. When he had to make war on the Bretons.

Perhaps the allusion to rich tournaments belongs to the time of
Wace rather than to that of Harold a century earlier, before the first
crusade, but certainly Harold did go with William on at least one
raid into Brittany, and the charming tapestry of Bayeux, which tra-
dition calls by the name of Queen Matilda, shows William's men-at-
arms crossing the sands beneath Mont-Saint-Michel, with the Latin
legend: — "Et venerunt ad Montem Michaelis. Hie Harold dux
trahebat eos de arena. Venerunt ad flumen Cononis." They came to
Mont-Saint-Michel, and Harold dragged them out of the quicksands.

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

They came to the river Couesnon. Harold must have got great fame
by saving life on the sands, to be remembered and recorded by the
Normans themselves after they had killed him; but this is the affair
of historians. Tourists note only that Harold and William came to the
Mount: — " Venerunt ad Montem." They would never have dared to
pass it, on such an errand, without stopping to ask the help of Saint
Michael.

If William and Harold came to the Mount, they certainly dined or
supped in the old refectory, which is where we have lain in wait for
them. Where Duke William was, his jongleur — jugleor — was not
far, and Wace knew, as every one in Normandy seemed to know, who
this favourite was, — his name, his character, and his song. To him
Wace owed one of the most famous passages in his story of the assault
at Hastings, where Duke William and his battle began their advance
against the English lines: —

Taillefer qui mult bien chantout
Sor un cheval qui tost alout
Devant le due alout chantant
De Karlemaigne e de Rollant
E d'Oliver e des vassals
Qui morurent en Rencevals.
Quant il orent chevalchie tant
Qu'as Engleis vindrent apreismant:
'' Sire," dist Taillefer, " merci!
lo vos ai longuement servi.
Tot mon servise me devez.
Hui se vos plaist le me rendez.
For tot guerredon vos requier
E si vos voil forment preier
Otreiez mei que io ni faille
Le premier colp de la bataille."
Li dus respondi: " Io rotrei."

Taillefer who was famed for song,
Mounted on a charger strong,
Rode on before the Duke, and sang
Of Roland and of Charlemagne,
Oliver and the vassals all
Who fell in fight at Roncesvals.
When they had ridden till they saw
The English battle close before:
" Sire," said Taillefer, " a grace!
I have served you long and well;
All reward you owe me still; .

To-day repay me if you please.
For all guerdon I require,
And ask of you in formal prayer.
Grant to me as mine of right
The first blow struck in the fight."
The Duke answered: "I grant."

Of course, critics doubt the story, as they very properly doubt every-
thing. They maintain that the "Chanson de Roland" was not as old
as the battle of Hastings, and certainly Wace gave no sufficient proof
of it. Poetry was not usually written to prove facts. Wace wrote z

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND 21

hundred years after the battle of Hastings. One is not morally required
to be pedantic to the point of knowing more than Wace knew, but the
feeling of scepticism, before so serious a monument as Mont-Saint-
Michel, is annoying. The "Chanson de Roland" ought not to be
trifled with, at least by tourists in search of art. One is shocked at the
possibility of being deceived about the starting-point of American
genealogy. Taillefer and the song rest on the same evidence that
Duke William and Harold and the battle itself rest upon, and to
doubt the "Chanson" is to call the very roll of Battle Abbey in ques'
tion. The whole fabric of society totters; the British peerage turns
pale.

Wace did not invent all his facts. William of Malmesbury is sup-
posed to have written his prose chronicle about 11 20 when many of
the men who fought at Hastings must have been alive, and William
expressly said: "Tunc cantilena Rollandi inchoata ut martium viri
exemplum pugnaturos accenderet, inclamatoque dei auxilio, praelium
consertum." Starting the "Chanson de Roland" to inflame the
fighting temper of the men, battle was joined. This seems enough
proof to satisfy any sceptic, yet critics still suggest that the "cantilena
Rollandi ' ' must have been a Norman ' ' Chanson de Rou, ' ' or " Rollo, ' ' or
at best an earlier version of the "Chanson de Roland"; but no Nor-
man chanson would have inflamed the martial spirit of William's army,
which was largely French; and as for the age of the version, it is quite
immaterial for Mont-Saint-Michel; the actual version is old enough.

Taillefer himself is more vital to the interest of the dinner in the
refectory, and his name was not mentioned by William of Malmes-
bury. If the song was started by the Duke's order, it was certainly
started by the Duke's jongleur, and the name of this jongleur happens
to be known on still better authority than that of William of Malmes-
bury. Guy of Amiens went to England in 1068 as almoner of Queen
Matilda, and there wrote a Latin poem on the battle of Hastings
which must have been complete within ten years after the battle was

22 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

fought, for Guy died in 1076. Taillefer, he said, led the Duke's bat-
tle:—

Incisor-ferri mimus cognomine dictus.

"Taillefer, a jongleur known by that name." A mime was a singer,
but Taillefer was also an actor: —

Histrio cor audax nimium quem nobilitabat.

"A jongleur whom a very brave heart ennobled." The jongleur was
not noble by birth, but was ennobled by his bravery.

Hortatur Gallos verbis et territat Anglos
Alte projiciens ludit et ense suo.

Like a drum-major with his staff, he threw his sword high in the air
and caught it, while he chanted his song to the French, and terrified
the English. The rhymed chronicle of Geoflfroy Gaimer who wrote
about 1 1 50, and that of Benoist who was Wace's rival, added the
story that Taillefer died in the melee.

The most unlikely part of the tale was, after all, not the singing of
the "Chanson," but the prayer of Taillefer to the Duke: —

"Otreiez mei que io ni faille
Le premier colp de la bataille."

Legally translated, Taillefer asked to be ennobled, and offered to pay
for it with his life. The request of a jongleur to lead the Duke's battle
seems incredible. In early French "bataille" meant battalion, — the
column of attack. The Duke's grant: "Io I'otrei!" seems still more
fanciful. Yet Guy of Amiens distinctly confirmed the story: "His-
trio cor audax nimium quem nobilitabat"; a stage-player — a juggler
— the Duke's singer — whose bravery ennobled him. The Dukt
granted him — octroya — his patent of nobility on the field.

All this preamble leads only to unite the " Chanson " with the archi-
tecture of the Mount, by means of Duke William and his Breton cam-
paign of 1058. The poem and the church are akin; they go together,
and explain each other. Their common trait is their military character

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND 23

peculiar to the eleventh century. The round arch is masculine. The
"Chanson" is so masculine that, in all its four thousand lines, the
only Christian woman so much as mentioned was Alda, the sister of
Oliver and the betrothed of Roland, to whom one stanza, exceedingly
like a later insertion, was given, toward the end. Never after the first
crusade did any great poem rise to such heroism as to sustain itself
without a heroine. Even Dante attempted no such feat.

Duke William's party, then, is to be considered as assembled at
supper in the old refectory, in the year 1058, while the triumpha'
piers of the church above are rising. The Abbot, Ralph of Beaumont,
is host; Duke William sits with him on a dais; Harold is by his side
"a grant enor"; the Duke's brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, with the
other chief vassals, are present; and the Duke's jongleur Taillefer is at
his elbow. The room is crowded with soldiers and monks, but all are
equally anxious to hear Taillefer sing. As soon as dinner is over, at
a nod from the Duke, Taillefer begins: —

Carles li reis nostre emperere magnes Charles the king, our emperor, the great,

Set anz tuz plains ad estet en Espaigne Seven years complete has been in Spain,

Cunquist la tere tresque en la mer altaigne Conquered the land as far as the high seas,

Ni ad castel ki devant lui remaigne Nor is there castle that holds against him,

Murs ne citez ni est remes a fraindre. Nor wall or city left to capture.

The "Chanson" opened with these lines, which had such a direct
and personal bearing on every one who heard them as to sound like
prophecy. Within ten years William was to stand in England where
Charlemagne stood in Spain. His mind was full of it, and of the
means to attain it; and Harold was even more absorbed than he by the
anxiety of the position. Harold had been obliged to take oath that he
would support William's claim to the English throne, but he was still
undecided, and William knew men too well to feel much confidence in
an oath. As Taillefer sang on, he reached the part of Ganelon, the
typical traitor, the invariable figure of mediaeval society. No feudal
lord was without a Ganelon. Duke William saw them all about him.

24 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

He might have felt that Harold would play the part, but if Harold
should choose rather to be Roland, Duke William could have foretold
that his own brother. Bishop Odo, after gorging himself on the plunder
of half England, would turn into a Ganelon so dangerous as to require
a prison for life. When Taillefer reached the battle-scenes, there was
no further need of imagination to realize them. They were scenes of
yesterday and to-morrow. For that matter, Charlemagne or his suc-
cessor was still at Aix, and the Moors were still in Spain. Archbishop
Turpin of Rheims had fought with sword and mace in Spain, while
Bishop Odo of Bayeux was to marshal his men at Hastings, like a
modern general, with a staff, but both were equally at home on the
field of battle. Verse by verse, the song was a literal mirror of the
Mount. The battle of Hastings was to be fought on the Archangel's
Day. What happened to Roland at Roncesvalles was to happen to
Harold at Hastings, and Harold, as he was dying like Roland, was to
see his brother Gyrth die like Oliver. Even Taillefer was to be a part,
and a distinguished part, of his chanson. Sooner or later, all were to
die in the large and simple way of the eleventh century. Duke William
himself, twenty years later, was to meet a violent death at Mantes in
the same spirit, and if Bishop Odo did not die in battle, he died, at
least, like an eleventh-century hero, on the first crusade. First or last,
the whole company died in fight, or in prison, or on crusade, while the
monks shrived them and prayed.

Then Taillefer certainly sang the great death-scenes. Even to this
day every French school-boy, if he knows no other poetry, knows
these verses by heart. In the eleventh century they wrung the heart
of every man-at-arms in Europe, whose school was the field of battle
and the hand-to-hand fight. No modern singer ever enjoys such power
over an audience as Taillefer exercised over these men who were actors
as well as listeners. In the melee at Roncesvalles, overborne by
innumerable Saracens, Oliver at last calls for help: —

H
X

o
z

W
W
H

o
hJ
<

W
K
H

J'
U
X
U

I— I

tn
I

z
o

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND

Munjoie escriet e haltement e cler.
RoUant apelet sun ami e sun per;
" Sire compainz a mei kar vus justez.
A grant dulur ermes hoi deserveret." Aoi.

" Montjoie!" he cries, loud and clear.
Roland he calls, his friend and peer:
" Sir Friend! ride now to help me here!
Parted to-day, great pity were."

Of course the full value of the verse cannot be regained. One knows
neither how it was sung nor even how it was pronounced. The asso-
nances are beyond recovering; the "laisse" or leash of verses or
assonances with the concluding cry, "Aoi," has long ago vanished
from verse or song. The sense is as simple as the " Ballad of Chevy
Chase," but one must imagine the voice and acting. Doubtless
Taillefer acted each motive ; when Oliver called loud and clear, Taille-
fer's voice rose; when Roland spoke "doulcement et suef," the singer
must have sung gently and soft; and when the two friends, with the
singular courtesy of knighthood and dignity of soldiers, bowed to each
other in parting and turned to face their deaths, Taillefer may have
indicated the movement as he sang. The verses gave room for great
acting. Hearing Oliver's cry for help, Roland rode up, and at sight
of the desperate field, lost for a moment his consciousness: —

As vus Rollant sur sun cheval pasmet
E Olivier ki est a mort nafrez!
Tant ad 'sainiet li oil li sunt trublet
Ne luinz ne pres ne poet veeir si cler
Que reconuisset nisun hume mortel.
Sun cumpaignun cum il I'ad encuntret
Sil fiert amunt sur I'elme a or gemmet
Tut li detrenchet d'ici que al nasel
Mais en la teste ne I'ad mie adeset.
A icel colp I'ad Rollanz reguardet
Si li demandet dulcement et suef
"Sire cumpainz, faites le vus de gred?
Ja est CO Rollanz ki tant vus soelt amer.
Par nule guise ne m'aviez desfiet,"
Dist Oliviers: "Or vus oi jo parler
lo ne vus vei. Veied vus damnedeus!
Ferut vus ai. Kar le me pardunez!"
Rollanz respunt: "Jo n'ai nient de mel.
Jol vus parduins ici e devant deu."
A icel mot I'uns al altre ad clinet.
Par tcl amur as les vus desevrezi

There Roland sits unconscious on his horse,

And Oliver who wounded is to death,

So much has bled, his eyes grow dark to him,

Nor far nor near can see so clear

As to recognize any mortal man.

His friend, when he has encountered him.

He strikes upon the helmet of gemmed gold,

Splits it from the crown to the nose-piece,

But to the head he has not reached at all.

At this blow Roland looks at him.

Asks him gently and softly:

"Sir Friend, do you it in earnest?

You know 't is Roland who has so loved you.

In no way have you sent to me defiance."

Says OUver: "Indeed I hear you speak,

I do not see you. May God see and save you!

Strike you I did. I pray you pardon me."

Roland replies: "I have no harm at all.

I pardon you here and before God ! "

At this word, one to the other bends himself.

With such affection, there they separate.

26 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

No one should try to render this into English — or, indeed, into
modern French — verse, but any one who will take the trouble to
catch the metre and will remember that each verse in the " leash " ends
in the same sound, -r- aimer, parler, cler, mortel, damnede, mel, deu,
suef, nasel, — however the terminal syllables may be spelled, can fol-
low the feeling of the poetry as well as though it were Greek hexam-
eter. He will feel the simple force of the words and action, as he feels
Homer. It is the grand style, — the eleventh century: —
Ferut vus ai! Kar le me pardunez!

Not a syllable is lost, and always the strongest syllable is chosen.
Even the sentiment is monosyllabic and curt : —
Ja est 50 Rollanz ki tant vus soelt amer!

Taillefer had, in such a libretto, the means of producing dramatic
effects that the French comedy or the grand opera never approached,
and such as made Bayreuth seem thin and feeble. Duke William's
barons must have clung to his voice and action as though they were in
the very m^lee, striking at the helmets of gemmed gold. They had all
been there, and were to be there again. As the climax approached,
they saw the scene itself; probably they had seen it every year, more
or less, since they could swing a sword. Taillefer chanted the death of
Oliver and of Archbishop Turpin and all the other barons of the rear
guard, except Roland, who was left for dead by the Saracens when they
fled on hearing the horns of Charlemagne's returning host. Roland
came back to consciousness on feeling a Saracen marauder tugging at
his sword Durendal. With a blow of his ivory horn — oliphant — he
killed the pagan; then feeling death near, he prepared for it. His first
thought was for Durendal, his sword, which he could not leave to
infidels. In the singular triple repetition which gives more of the same
solidity and architectural weight to the verse, he made three attempts
to break the sword, with a lament — a plaint — for each. Three times
he struck with all his force against the rock; each time the sword
rebounded without breaking. The third time —

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND 27

Rollanz ferit en une pierre bise Roland strikes on a grey stone,

Plus en abat que jo ne vus sai dire. More of it cuts off than I can tell you.

L'espee cruist ne fruisset ne ne briset The sword grinds, but shatters not nor breaks,

Cuntre le ciel amunt est resortie. Upward against the sky it rebounds.

Quant veil li quens que ne la fraindrat mie When the Count sees that he can never break it,

Mult dulcement la plainst a sei meisme. Very gently he mourns it to himself:

"E! Durendal cum ies bele e saintisme! "Ah, Durendal, how fair you are and sacred!

En I'oret punt asez i ad reliques. In your golden guard are many relics,

La dent saint Pierre e del sane seint Basilic The tooth of Saint Peter and blood of Saint

Basil,

E des chevels mun seignur seint Denisie And hair of my seigneur Saint -Denis,

Del vestment i ad seinte Marie. Of the garment too of Saint Mary.

II nen est dreiz que paien te baillisent. It is not right that pagans should own you.

De chrestiens devez estre servie. By Christians you should be served,

Ne vus ait hum ki facet cuardie ! Nor should man have you who does cowardice.

Mult larges terres de vus averai cunquises Many wide lands by you I have conquered

Que Carles tient ki la barbe ad flurie. That Charles holds, who has the white beard,

E li emperere en est e ber e riches." And emperor of them b noble and rich."

This "laisse" is even more eleventh-century than the other, but it
appealed no longer to the warriors; it sf>oke rather to the monks. To
the warriors, the sword itself was the religion, and the relics were
details of ornament or strength. To the priest, the list of relics was
more eloquent than the Regent diamond on the hilt and the Kohinoor
on the scabbard. Even to us it is interesting if it is understood. Roland
had gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He had stopped at Rome
and won the friendship of Saint Peter, as the tooth proved; he had
passed through Constantinople and secured the help of Saint Basil;
he had reached Jerusalem and gained the affection of the Virgin; he
had come home to France and secured the support of his "seigneur"
Saint Denis; for Roland, like Hugh Capet, was a liege-man of Saint
Denis and French to the heart. France, to him, was Saint Denis, and
at most the He de France, but not Anjou or even Mame. These were
countries he had conquered with Durendal: —

Jo I'en crmquis e Anjou e Bretaigne
Si Ten cunquis e Peitou e le Maine
Jo Ten cunquis Normendie la tranche
Si Ten cunquis Provence e Equitaigne.

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

He had conquered these for his emperor Charlemagne with the help of
his immediate spiritual lord or seigneur Saint Denis, but the monks
knew that he could never have done these feats without the help of
Saint Peter, Saint Basil, and Saint Mary the Blessed Virgin, whose
relics, in the hilt of his sword, were worth more than any king's ran-
som. To this day a tunic of the Virgin is the most precious property of
the cathedral at Chartres. Either one of Roland's relics would have
made the glory of any shrine in Europe, and every monk knew their
enormous value and power better than he knew the value of Ro-
land's conquests.

Yet even the religion is martial, as though it were meant for the
fighting Archangel and Odo of Bayeux. The relics serve the sword;
the sword is not in service of the relics. As the death-scene approaches,
the song becomes even more military: —

^o sent Rollanz que la mort le tresprent

Devers la teste sur le quer U descent.

Desuz un pin i est alez curanz

Sur 1' erbe verte si est culchiez adenz

Desuz lui met s'espee e I'olifant

Turnat sa teste vers la paiene gent.

Pur CO I'ad fait que il voelt veirement

Que Carles diet et trestute sa gent

Li gentils quens quil fut morz cunqueranz.

Then Roland feels that death is taking him;
Down from the head upon the heart it falb.
Beneath a pine he hastens running;
On the green grass he throws himself down;
Beneath him puts his sword and oliphant,
Turns his face toward the pagan army.
For this he does it, that he wishes greatly
That Charles should say and all his men,
The gentle Count has died a conqueror.

Thus far, not a thought or a word strays from the field of war. With
a childlike intensity, every syllable bends toward the single idea —

Li gentils quens quil fut morz cunqueranz.

Only then the singer allowed the Church to assert some of its rights: —

Qo sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus
Devers Espaigne gist en un pui agut
A I'une main si ad sun piz batut.
" Deus meie culpe vers les tues vertuz
De mes pecchiez des granz e des menuz
Que jo ai fait des I'ure que nez fui
Tresqu'a cest jur que ci sui consouz."
Sun destre guant en ad vers deu tendut
Angle del del i descendent a lui. Aoi.

Then Roland feels that his last hour has come
Facing toward Spain he lies on a steep hill,
While with one hand he beats upon his breast:
" Mea culpa, God! through force of thy miracles
Pardon my sins, the great as well as small.
That I have done from the hour I was born
Down to this day that I have now attained."
His right glove toward God he lifted up.
Angels from heaven descend on him. AoL

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND

Lt quens Rollanz se jut desuz un pin
Envers Espaigne en ad turnet sun vis
De plusiu^ choses a remembrer li prist
De tantes teues cume li bers cunquist

De dulce France des humes de sun lign
De Carlemagne sun seignur kil nurrit
Ne poet muer men plurt e ne suspirt
Mais lui meisme ne voelt metre en ubil
Claimet sa culpa si priet deu mercit.
"Veire pateme ki unkes ne mentis
Seint Lazarun de mort resurrexis
E Daniel des liuns guaresis
Guaris de mei I'anme de tuz perils
Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie fis."

Sun destre guant a deu en puroflFrit
E de sa main seinz Gabriel lad pris
Desur sun braz teneit le chief enclin
Juintes ses mains est alez a sa fin.
Deus li tramist sun angle cherubin
E Seint Michiel de la mer del peril
Ensemble od els Seinz Gabriels i vint
L' anme del cunte portent en pareis.

Count Roland throws himself beneath a pine
And toward Spain has turned his face away.
Of many things he called the memory back,
Of many lands that he, the brave, had con*

quered,
Of gentle France, the men of his lineage.
Of Charlemagne his lord, who nurtured him;
He cannot help but weep and sigh for these,
But for himself will not forget to care;
He cries his Culpe, he prays to God for grace.
"O God the Father who has never lied,
Who raised up Saint Lazarus from death,
And Daniel from the lions saved.
Save my soul from all the perils
For the sins that in my life I did! "

His right-hand glove to God he profiFered;
Saint Gabriel from his hand took it ;
Upon his arm he held his head inclined,
Folding his hands he passed to his end.
God sent to him his angel cherubim
And Saint Michael of the Sea in Peril,
Together with them came Saint Gabriel.
The soul of the Count they bear to Paradise.

Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for colour
and line, and its taste for war and worship, wine and women. Not one
man in a hundred thousand could now feel what the eleventh century
felt in these verses of the " Chanson," and there is no reason for trying
to do so, but there is a certain use in trying for once to understand not
so much the feeling as the meaning. The naivete of the poetry is that
of the society. God the Father was the feudal seigneur, who raised
Lazarus — his baron or vassal — from the grave, and freed Daniel,
AS an evidence of his power and loyalty; a seigneur who never lied, or
was false to his word. God the Father, as feudal seigneur, absorbs the
Trinity, and, what is more significant, absorbs or excludes also the
Virgin, who is not mentioned in the prayer. To this seigneur, Roland
in dying, proffered (puroffrit) his right-hand gauntlet. Death was an
act of homage. God sent down his Archangel Gabriel as his represen-
tative to accept the homage and receive the glove. To Duke William

30 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

and his barons nothing could seem more natural and correct. God was
not farther away than Charlemagne.

Correct as the law may have been, the religion even at that time
must have seemed to the monks to need professional advice. Roland's
life was not exemplary. The " Chanson " had taken pains to show that
the disaster at Roncesvalles was due to Roland's headstrong folly and
temper. In dying, Roland had not once thought of these faults, or
repented of his worldly ambitions, or mentioned the name of Alda, his
betrothed. He had clung to the memory of his wars and conquests,
his lineage, his earthly seigneur Charlemagne, and of "douce France."
He had forgotten to give so much as an allusion to Christ. The poet
regarded all these matters as the affair of the Church; all the warrior
cared for was courage, loyalty, and prowess.

The interest of these details lies not in the scholarship or the his-
torical truth or even the local colour, so much as in the art. The
naivete of the thought is repeated by the simplicity of the verse. Word
and thought are equally monosyllabic. Nothing ever matched it. The
words bubble like a stream in the woods : —

^o sent Rollanz de sun tens ni ad plus.

Try and put them into modern French, and see what will happen: —

Que jo ai fait des I'ure que nez fui.
The words may remain exactly the same, but the poetry will have
gone out of them. Five hundred years later, even the English critics
had so far lost their sense for military poetry that they professed to be
shocked by Milton's monosyllables: —

Whereat he inly raged, and, as they talked,
Smote him into the midrifi with a stone
That beat out life.

Milton's language was indeed more or less archaic and Biblical; it
was a Puritan affectation; but the "Chanson" in the refectory act-
ually reflected, repeated, echoed, the piers and arches of the Abbey
Church just rising above. The verse is built up. The qualities of the

LA CHANSON DE ROLAND 31

architecture reproduce themselves in the song: the same directness,
simplicity, absence of self-consciousness; the same intensity of pur-
pose; even the same material; the prayer is granite: —

Guaris de mei I'anme de tuz perils
Pur les pecchiez que en ma vie fisl

The action of dying is felt, like the dropping of a keystone into the

vault, and if the Romanesque arches in the church, which are within

hearing, could speak, they would describe what they are doing in the

precise words of the poem : —

Desur sun braz teneit le chief enclin Upon their shoulders have their heads inclined,

Juintes ses mains est alez a sa fin. Folded their hands, and sunken to their rest.

Many thousands of times these verses must have been sung at the
Mount and echoed in every castle and on every battle-field from the
Welsh Marches to the shores of the Dead Sea. No modern opera or
play ever approached the popularity of the " Chanson." None has ever
expressed with anything like the same completeness the society that
produced it. Chanted by every minstrel, — known by heart, from
beginning to end, by every man and woman and child, lay or clerica\
— translated into every tongue, — more intensely felt, if possible, in
Italy and Spain than in Normandy and England, — perhaps most
effective, as a work of art, when sung by the Templars in their great
castles in the Holy Land, — it is now best felt at Mont-Saint-Michel,
and from the first must have been there at home. The proof is the line,
evidently inserted for the sake of its local effect, which invoked Saint
Michael in Peril of the Sea at the climax of Roland's death, and one
needs no original documents or contemporary authorities to prove that,
when Taillefer came to this invocation, not only Duke William and
his barons, but still more Abbot Ranulf and his monks, broke into a
frenzy of sympathy which expressed the masculine and military pas-
sions of the Archangel better than it accorded with the rules of Saint
Benedict.

CHAPTER III

THE MERVEILLE

THE nineteenth century moved fast and furious, so that one who
moved in it felt sometimes giddy, watching it spin; but the
eleventh moved faster and more furiously still. The Norman con-
quest of England was an immense effort, and its consequences were
far-reaching, but the first crusade was altogether the most interesting
event in European history. Never has the Western world shown any-
thing like the energy and unity with which she then flung herself on
the East, and for the moment made the East recoil. Barring her family
quarrels, Europe was a unity then, in thought, will, and object. Chris-
tianity was the unit. Mont -Saint-Michel and Byzantium were near
each other. The Emperor Constantine and the Emperor Charlemagne
were figured as allies and friends in the popular legend. The East was
the common enemy, always superior in wealth and numbers, fre-
quently in energy, and sometimes in thought and art. The outburst
of the first crusade was splendid even in a military sense, but it was
great beyond comparison in its reflection in architecture, ornament,
poetry, colour, religion, and philosophy. Its men were astonishing,
and its women were worth all the rest.

Mont-Saint-Michel, better than any other spot in the world, keeps
the architectural record of that ferment, much as the Sicilian temples
keep the record of the similar outburst of Greek energy, art, poetry,
and thought, fifteen hundred years before. Of the eleventh century,
it is true, nothing but the church remains at the Mount, and, if studied
further, the century has got to be sought elsewhere, which is not diffi-
cult, since it is preserved in any number of churches in every path of
tourist travel. Normandy is full of it; Bayeux and Caen contain little
else. At the Mount, the eleventh-century work was antiquated before

THE MERVEILLE 3,3

it was finished. In the year 1 1 12, Abbot Roger II was obliged to plan
and construct a new group in such haste that it is said to have been
finished in 1 122. It extends from what we have supposed to be the old
refectory to the parvis, and abuts on the three lost spans of the
church, covering about one hundred and twenty feet. As usual there
were three levels; a cr^-pt or gallery beneath, known as the Aquilon; a
cloister or promenoir above ; and on the level of the church a dormitory,
now lost. The group is one ofthe most interesting in France, another
pons seclorum, an antechamber to the west portal of Chartres, which
bears the same date (11 10-25). It is the famous period of Transition,
the glory of the twelfth century, the object of our pilgrimage.

Art is a fairly large field where no one need jostle his neighbour,
and no one need shut himself up in a corner; but, if one insists on taking
a corner of preference, one might ofTer some excuse for choosing the
Gothic Transition. The quiet, restrained strength of the Romanesque
married to the graceful curves and vaulting imagination of the Gothic
makes a union nearer the ideal than is often allowed in marriage. The
French, in their best days, loved it with a constancy that has thrown
a sort of aureole over their fickleness since. They never tired of its
possibilities. Sometimes they put the pointed arch within the round,
or above it; sometimes they put the round within the pointed. Some-
times a Roman arch covered a cluster of pointed windows, as though
protecting and caressing its children; sometimes a huge pointed arch
covered a great rose-window spreading across the whole front of an
enormous cathedral, with an arcade of Romanesque windows beneath.
The French architects felt no discord, and there was none. Even the
pure Gothic was put side by side with the pure Roman. You will see
no later Gothic than the choir of the Abbey Church above (1450-
1521), unless it is the north fl^che of Chartres Cathedral (1507-13);
and if you will look down the nave, through the triumphal arches, into
the pointed choir four hundred years more modern, you can judge
whether there is any real discord. For those who feel the art, there is

34 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

none; the strength and the grace join hands; the man and woman love
each other still.

The difference of sex is not imaginary. In 1058, when the triumphal
columns were building, and Taillefer sang to William the Bastard and
Harold the Saxon, Roland still prayed his "mea culpa" to God the
Father and gave not a thought to Alda his betrothed. In the twelfth
century Saint Bernard recited "Ave Stella Maris" in an ecstasy of
miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in
battle cried, " Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie." What the Roman
could not express flowered into the Gothic; what the masculine mind
could not idealize in the warrior, it idealized in the woman ; no archi-
tecture that ever grew on earth, except the Gothic, gave this effect of
flinging its passion against the sky.

When men no longer felt the passion, they fell back on themselves,
or lower. The architect returned to the round arch, and even further
to the flatness of the Greek colonnade; but this was not the fault of
the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. What they had to say they said;
what they felt they expressed; and if the seventeenth century forgot
it, the twentieth in turn has forgotten the seventeenth. History is only
a catalogue of the forgotten. The eleventh century is no worse off than
its neighbours. The twelfth is, in architecture, rather better off than
the nineteenth. These two rooms, the Aquilon and promenoir, which
mark the beginning of the Transition, are, on the whole, more modern
than Saint-Sulpice, or II Gesu at Rome. In the same situation, for the
same purposes, any architect would be proud to repeat them to-day.

The Aquilon, though a hall or gallery of importance in its day,
seems to be classed among crypts. M. Camille Enlart, in his " Manual
of French Archaeology" (p. 252) gives a list of Romanesque and Tran-
sition crypts, about one hundred and twenty, to serve as examples for
the study. The Aquilon is not one of them, but the crypt of Saint-
Denis and that of Chartres Cathedral would serve to teach any over-
curious tourist all that he should want to know about such matters.

ABBEY OF MONT-SAINT-MICHEL : THE REFECTORY

THE MERVEILLE 35

Photographs such as those of the Monuments Historiques answer all
the just purposes of underground travel. The Aquilon is one's first
lesson in Transition architecture because it is dated (11 12); and the
crypt of Saint-Denis serves almost equally well because the Abbe
Suger must have begun his plans for it about 1122. Both have the
same arcs douhleaux and arcs-formerets, though in opposite arrange-
ment. Both show the first heavy hint at the broken arch. There are no
nervures — no rib-vaulting, — and hardly a suggestion of the Gothic
as one sees it in the splendid crypt of the Gros Piliers close at hand,
except the elaborately intersecting vaults and the heavy columns;
but the promenoir above is an astonishing leap in time and art. The
promenoir has the same arrangement and columns as the Aquilon, but
the vaults are beautifully arched and pointed, with ribs rising directly
from the square capitals and intersecting the central spacings, in a
spirit which neither you nor I know how to distinguish from the pure
Gothic of the thirteenth century, unless it is that the arches are hardly
pointed enough; they seem to the eye almost round. The height ap-
pears to be about fourteen feet.

The promenoir of Abbot Roger II has an interest to pilgrims who
are going on to the shrine of the Virgin, because the date of the pro-
menoir seems to be exactly the same as the date which the Abb4
Bulteau assigns for the western portal of Chartres. Ordinarily a date
is no great matter, but when one has to run forward and back, with the
agility of an electric tram, between two or three fixed points, it is
convenient to fix them once for all. The Transition is complete here
in the promenoir, which was planned as early as 1 1 15. The subject of
vaulting is far too ambitious for summer travel ; it is none too easy for
a graduate of the Beaux Arts; and few architectural fields have been so
earnestly discussed and disputed. We must not touch it. The age of
the " Chanson de Roland " itself is not so dangerous a topic. Our vital
needs are met, more or less sufficiently, by taking the promenoir at the
Mount, the crypt at Saint-Denis, and the western portal at Chartres,

36 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

as the trinity of our Transition, and roughly calling their date the
years 1 1 1 5-20. To overload the memory with dates is the vice of every
schoolmaster and the passion of every second-rate scholar. Tourists
want as few dates as possible; what they want is poetry. Yet a singu-
lar coincidence, with which every classroom is only too familiar, has
made of the years -'15a curiously convenient group, and the year 1 1 1 5
is as convenient as any for the beginning of the century of Transition.
That was the year when Saint Bernard laid the foundations of his
Abbey of Clairvaux. Perhaps 1115, or at latest 1117, was the year
when Abelard sang love-songs to H61oise in Canon Fulbert's house
in the Rue des Chantres, beside the cloister of Notre Dame in Paris.
The Abbe Suger, the Abbe Bernard, and the Abbe Abelard are the
three interesting men of the French Transition.

The promenoir, then, shall pass for the year 1 1 15, and, as such, is
an exceedingly beautiful hall, uniting the splendid calm and serious-
ness of the Romanesque with the exquisite lines of the Gothic. You
will hardly see its equal in the twelfth century. At Angers the great
hall of the Bishop's Palace survives to give a point of comparison, but
commonly the halls of that date were not vaulted ; they had timber
roofs, and have perished. The promenoir is about sixty feet long, and
divided into two aisles, ten feet wide, by a row of columns. If it were
used on great occasions as a refectory, eighty or a hundred persons
could have been seated at table, and perhaps this may have been about
the scale of the Abbey's needs, at that time. Whatever effort of fancy
was needed to place Duke William and Harold in the old refectory of
1058, none whatever is required in order to see his successors in the
halls of Roger II. With one exception they were not interesting per-
sons. The exception was Henry II of England and Anjou, and his wife
Eleanor of Guienne, who was for a while Regent of Normandy. One of
their children was born at Domfront, just beyond Avranches, and the
Abbot was asked to be godfather. In 11 58, just one hundred years
after Duke William's visit, King Henry and his whole suite came to the

THE MERVEILLE 37

Abbey, heard mass, and dined in the refectory. " Rex venit ad Mon-
tem Sancti Michaelis, audita missa ad magis altare, comedit in Refec-
torio cum baronibus suis." Abbot Robert of Torigny was his host,
and very possibly William of Saint-Pair looked on. Perhaps he recited
parts of his "Roman" before the King. One may be quite sure that
when Queen Eleanor came to the Mount she asked the poet to recite
his verses, for Eleanor gave law to poets.

One might linger over Abbot Robert of Torigny, who was a very
great man in his day, and an especially great architect, but too ambi-
tious. All his work, including the two towers, crumbled and fell for
want of proper support. What would correspond to the cathedrals of
Noyon and Soissons and the old clocher and fl^che of Chartres is lost.
We have no choice but to step down into the next century at once, and
into the full and perfect Gothic of the great age when the new Chartres
was building.

In the year 1203, Philip Augustus expelled the English from Nor-
mandy and conquered the province; but, in the course of the war the
Duke of Brittany, who was naturally a party to any war that took
place under his eyes, happened to burn the town beneath the Abbey,
and in doing so, set fire unintentionally to the Abbey itself. The sacri-
lege shocked Philip Augustus, and the wish to conciliate so powerful a
vassal as Saint Michel, or his abbot, led the King of France to give a
large sum of money for repairing the buildings. The Abbot Jordan
(i 191-1212) at once undertook to outdo all his predecessors, and, with
an immense ambition, planned the huge pile which covers the whole
north face of the Mount, and which has always borne the expressive
name of the Merveille.

The general motive of abbatial building was common to them all.
Abbeys were large households. The church was the centre, and at
Mont-Saint-Michel the summit, for the situation compelled the ab-
bots there to pile one building on another instead of arranging them on
a level in squares or parallelograms. The dormitory in any case had to

38 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

be near a door of the church, because the Rule required constant serv-
ices, day and night. The cloister was also hard-by the church door,
and, at the Mount, had to be on the same level in order to be in open
air. Naturally the refectory must be immediately beneath one or the
other of these two principal structures, and the hall, or place of meet-
ing for business with the outside world, or for internal administration,
or for guests of importance, must be next the refectory. The kitchen
and offices would be placed on the lowest stage, if for no other reason,
because the magazines were two hundred feet below at the landing-
place, and all supplies, including water, had to be hauled up an in-
clined plane by windlass. To administer such a society required the
most efficient management. An abbot on this scale was a very great
man, indeed, who enjoyed an establishment of his own, close by, with
officers in no small number; for the monks alone numbered sixty, and
even these were not enough for the regular church services at seasons
of pilgrimage. The Abbot was obliged to entertain scores and hun-
dreds of guests, and these, too, of the highest importance, with large
suites. Every ounce of food must be brought from the mainland, or
fished from the sea. All the tenants and their farms, their rents and
contributions, must be looked after. No secular prince had a more
serious task of administration, and none did it so well. Tenani^s always
preferred an abbot or bishop for landlord. The Abbey was the highest
administrative creation of the Middle Ages, and when one has made
one's pilgrimage to Chartres, one might well devote another summer
to visiting what is left of Clairvaux, Citeaux, Cluny, and the other
famous monasteries, with VioUet-le-Duc to guide, in order to satisfy
one's mind whether, on the whole, such a life may not have had activity
as well as idleness.

This is a matter of economics, to be settled with the keepers of more
modern hotels, but the art had to suit the conditions, and when Abbot
Jordan decided to plaster this huge structure against the side of the
Mount, the architect had a relatively simple task to handle. The

THE MERVEILLE 39

engineering difficulties alone were very serious. The architectural plan
was plain enough. As the Abbot laid his requirements before the
architect, he seems to have begun by fixing the scale for a refectory
capable of seating two hundred guests at table. Probably no king in
Europe fed more persons at his table than this. According to M. Cor-
royer's plan, the length of the new refectory is one hundred and twenty-
three feet (37.5 metres). A row of columns down the centre divides it
into two aisles, measuring twelve feet clear, from column to column,
across the room. If tables were set the whole length of the two aisles,
forty persons could have been easily seated, in four rows, or one
hundred and sixty persons. Without crowding, the same space would
give room for fifty guests, or two hundred in all.

Once the scale was fixed, the arrangement was easy. Beginning at
the lowest possible level, one plain, very solidly built, vaulted room
served as foundation for another, loftier and more delicately vaulted ;
and this again bore another which stood on the level of the church,
and opened directly into the north transept. This arrangement was
then doubled; and the second set of rooms, at the west end, contained
the cellar on the lower level, another great room or hall above it, and the
cloister at the church door, also entering into the north transept. Door-
ways, passages, and stairs unite them all. The two heavy halls on the
lowest level are now called the almonry and the cellar, which is a
distinction between administrative arrangements that does not con-
cern us. Architecturally the rooms might, to our untrained eyes, be of
the same age with the Aquilon. They are earliest Transition, as far as a
tourist can see, or at least they belong to the class of crypts which has
an architecture of its own. The rooms that concern us are those imme-
diately above: the so-called Salle des Chevaliers at the west end; and
the so-called refectory at the east. Every writer gives these rooms
different names, and assigns them different purposes, but whatever
they were meant for, they are, as halls, the finest in France; the purest
in thirteenth-century perfection.

40 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

The Salle des Chevaliers of the Order of Saint Michael created by
Louis XI in 1469 was, or shall be for tourist purposes, the great hall
that every palace and castle contained, and in which the life of the
chateau centred. Planned at about the same time with the Cathedral
of Chartres (l 195-12 10), and before the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis,
this hall and its neighbour the refectory, studied together with the
cathedral and the abbey, are an exceedingly liberal education for
anybody, tourist or engineer or architect, and would make the fortune
of an intelligent historian, if such should happen to exist; but the last
thing we ask from them is education or instruction. We want only
their poetry, and shall have to look for it elsewhere. Here is only the
shell — the dead art — and silence. The hall is about ninety feet long,
and sixty feet in its greatest width. It has three ranges of columns
making four vaulted aisles which seem to rise about twenty-two feet in
height. It is warmed by two huge and heavy cheminees or fireplaces in
the outside wall, between the windows. It is lighted beautifully, but
mostly from above through round windows in the arching of the
vaults. The vaulting is a study for wiser men than we can ever be.
More than twenty strong round columns, free or engaged, with Roman-
esque capitals, support heavy ribs, or nervures, and while the two cen-
tral aisles are eighteen feet wide, the outside aisle, into which the
windows open, measures only ten feet in width, and has consequently
one of the most sharply pointed vaults we shall ever meet. The whole
design is as beautiful a bit of early Gothic as exists, but what would
take most time to study, if time were to spare, would be the instinct
of the Archangel's presence which has animated his architecture. The
masculine, military energy of Saint Michael lives still in every stone.
The genius that realized this warlike emotion has stamped his power
everywhere, on every centimetre of his work; in every ray of light; on
the mass of every shadow; wherever the eye falls; still more strongly
on all that the eye divines, and in the shadows that are felt like the
lights. The architect intended it all. Any one who doubts has only to

THE MERVEILLE 41

Step through the doorway in the corner into the refectory. There the
architect has undertaken to express the thirteenth-century idea of the
Archangel; he has left the twelfth century behind him.

The refectory, which has already served for a measure of the Abbot's
scale, is, in feeling, as different as possible from the hall. Six charming
columns run down the centre, dividing the room into two vaulted
aisles, apparently about twenty-seven feet in height. Wherever the
hall was heavy and serious, the refectory was made light and graceful.
Hardly a trace of the Romanesque remains. Only the slight, round
columns are not yet grooved or fluted, and their round capitals are
still slightly severe. Every detail is lightened. The great fireplaces
are removed to one end of the room. The most interesting change is
in the windows. When you reach Chartres, the great book of archi-
tecture will open on the word "Fenestration," — Fenetre, — a word as
ugly as the thing was beautiful ; and then, with pain and sorrow, you
will have to toil till you see how the architects of 1200 subordinated
every other problem to that of lighting their spaces. Without feeling
their lights, you can never feel their shadows. These two halls at
Mont-Saint-Michel are antechambers to the nave of Chartres; their
fenestration, inside and out, controls the whole design. The lighting
of the refectory is superb, but one feels its value in art only when it is
taken in relation to the lighting of the hall, and both serve as a simple
preamble to the romance of the Chartres windows.

The refectory shows what the architect did when, to lighten his
effects, he wanted to use every possible square centimetre of light. He
has made nine windows; six on the north, two on the east, and one on
the south. They are nearly five feet wide, and about twenty feet high.
They flood the room. Probably they were intended for glass, and
M. Corroyer's volume contains wood-cuts of a few fragments of thir-
teenth-century glass discovered in his various excavations; but one
may take for granted that with so much light, colour was the object
intended. The floors would be tiled in colour; the walls would be hung

42 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

with colour; probably the vaults were painted in colour; one can see
it all in scores of illuminated manuscripts. The thirteenth century had
a passion for colour, and made a colour-world of its own which we have
got to explore.

The two halls remain almost the only monuments of what must be
called secular architecture of the early and perfect period of Gothic
art (1200-10). Churches enough remain, with Chartres at their head,
but all the great abbeys, palaces and chateaux of that day are ruins.
Arques, Gaillard, Montargis, Coucy, the old Louvre, Chinon, Angers,
as well as Cluny, Clairvaux, Citeaux, Jumi^ges, Vezelay, Saint-Denis,
Poissy, Fontevrault, and a score of other residences, royal or semi-
royal, have disappeared wholly, or have lost their residential build-
ings. When VioUet-le-Duc, under the Second Empire, was allowed to
restore one great chateau, he chose the latest, Pierrefonds, built by
Louis d'Orleans in 1390. Vestiges of Saint Louis's palace remain at
the Conciergerie, but the first great royal residence to be compared
with the Merveille is Amboise, dating from about 1500, three centu-
ries later. Civilization made almost a clean sweep of art. Only here, at
Mont-Saint-Michel, one may still sit at ease on the stone benches in
the embrasures of the refectory windows, looking over the thirteenth-
century ocean and watching the architect as he worked out the details
which were to produce or accent his contrasts or harmonies, heighten
his eflfects, or hide his show of effort, and all by means so true, simple,
and apparently easy that one seems almost competent to follow him.
One learns better in time. One gets to feel that these things were due
in part to an instinct that the architect himself might not have been
able to explain. The instinct vanishes as time creeps on. The halls at
Rouen or at Blois are more easily understood ; the Salle des Caryatides
of Pierre Lescot at the Louvre, charming as it is, is simpler still; and
one feels entirely at home in the Salle des Glaces which filled the
ambition of Louis XIV at Versailles.

If any lingering doubt remains in regard to the professional clever-

THE MERVEILLE 43

ness of the architect and the thoroughness of his study, we had best
return to the great hall, and pass through a low door in its extreme
outer angle, up a few steps into a little room some thirteen feet square,
beautifully vaulted, lighted, warmed by a large stone fireplace, and in
the corner, a spiral staircase leading up to another square room above
opening directly into the cloister. It is a little library or charter-house.
The arrangement is almost too clever for gravity, as is the case with
more than one arrangement in the Merveille. From the outside one
can see that at this corner the architect had to provide a heavy buttress
against a double strain, and he built up from the rock below a square
corner tower as support, into which he worked a spiral staircase lead-
ing from the cellar up to the cloisters. Just above the level of the great
hall he managed to construct this little room, a gem. The place was
near and far; it was quiet and central; William of Saint-Pair, had he
been still alive, might have written his " Roman" there; monks might
have illuminated missals there. A few steps upward brought them to
the cloisters for meditation; a few more brought them to the church
for prayer. A few steps downward brought them to the great hall, for
business, a few steps more led them into the refectory, for dinner. To
conteniplate the goodness of God was a simple joy when one had such
a room to work in; such a spot as the great hall to walk in, when the
storms blew; or the cloisters in which to meditate, when the sun shone;
such a dining-room as the refectory; and such a view from one's
windows over the infinite ocean and the guiles of Satan's quicksands.
From the battlements of Heaven, William of Saint-Pair looked down
on it with envy.

Of all parts of the Merveille, in summer, the most charming must
always have been the cloisters. Only the Abbey of the Mount was
rich and splendid enough to build a cloister like this, all in granite,
carved in forms as light as though it were wood; with columns arranged
in a peculiar triangular order that excited the admiration of VioUet-le-
Duc. "One of the most curious and complete cloisters that we have in

44 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

France," he said; although in France there are many beautiful and
curious cloisters. For another reason it has value. The architect
meant it to reassert, with all the art and grace he could command, the
mastery of love, of thought and poetry, in religion, over the masculine,
military energy of the great hall below. The thirteenth century rarely
let slip a chance to insist on this moral that love is law. Saint Francis
was preaching to the birds in 12 15 at Assisi, and the architect built
this cloister in 1226 at Mont-Saint-Michel. Both sermons were satu-
rated with the feeling of the time, and both are about equally worth
noting, if one aspires to feel the art.

A conscientious student has yet to climb down the many steps, on
the outside, and look up at the Merveille from below. Few buildings
in France are better worth the trouble. The horizontal line at the roof
measures two hundred and thirty-five feet. The vertical line of the
buttresses measures in round numbers one hundred feet. To make
walls of that height and length stand up at all was no easy matter, as
Robert de Torigny had shown; and so the architect buttressed them
from bottom to top with twelve long buttresses against the thrust of
the interior arches, and three more, bearing against the interior walls.
This gives, on the north front, fifteen strong vertical lines in a space of
two hundred and thirty-five feel. Between these lines the windows
tell their story; the seven long windows of the refectory on one side;
the seven rounded windows of the hall on the other. Even the corner
tower with the charter-house becomes as simple as the rest. The sum
of this impossible wall, and its exaggerated vertical lines, is strength
and intelligence at rest.

The whole Mount still kept the grand style; it expressed the unity
of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death,
Good and Bad ; it solved the whole problem of the universe. The priest
and the soldier were both at home here, in 1215 as in 1 115 or in 1058;
the politician was not outside of it; the sinner was welcome; the poet
was made happy in his own spirit, with a sympathy, almost an affeo

THE MERVEILLE 45

tion, that suggests a habit of verse in the Abbot as well as in the archi-
tect. God reconciles all. The world is an evident, obvious, sacred
harmony. Even the discord of war is a detail on which the Abbey
refuses to insist. Not till two centuries afterwards did the Mount take
on the modern expression of war as a discord in God's providence.
Then, in the early years of the fifteenth century, Abbot Pierre le Roy
plastered the gate of the chStelet, as you now see it, over the sunny
thirteenth-century entrance called Belle Chaise, which had treated
mere military construction with a sort of quiet contempt. You will
know what a chStelet is when you meet another; it frowns in a spirit
quite alien to the twelfth century; it jars on the religion of the place;
it forebodes wars of religion; dissolution of society; loss of unity; the
end of a world. Nothing is sadder than the catastrophe of Gothic art,
religion, and hope.

One looks back on it all as a picture; a symbol of unity; an assertion
of God and Man in a bolder, stronger, closer union than ever was
expressed by other art ; and when the idea is absorbed, accepted, and
perhaps partially understood, one may move on.

CHAPTER IV

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE

FROM Mont-Saint-Michel, the architectural road leads across Nor-
mandy, up the Seine to Paris, and not directly through Chartres,
which lies a little to the south. In the empire of architecture, Nor-
mandy was one kingdom, Brittany another; the He de France, with
Paris, was a third ; Touraine and the valley of the Loire were a fourth ;
and in the centre, the fighting-ground between them all, lay the coun-
ties of Chartres and Dreux. Before going to Chartres one should go
up the Seine and down the Loire, from Angers to Le Mans, and so
enter Chartres from Brittany after a complete circle; but if we set out
to do our pleasure on that scale, we must start from the Pyramid of
Cheops. We have set out from Mont-Saint- Michel ; we will go next to
Paris.

The architectural highway lies through Coutances, Bayeux, Caen,
Rouen, and Mantes. Every great artistic kingdom solved its archi-
tectural problems in its own way, as it did its religious, political, and
social problems, and no two solutions were ever quite the same; but
among them the Norman was commonly the most practical, and
sometimes the most dignified. We can test this rule by the standard
of the first town we stop at — Coutances. We can test it equally well at
Bayeux or Caen, but Coutances comes first after Mont-Saint-Michel;
let us begin with it, and state the problems with their Norman solu-
tion, so that it may be ready at hand to compare with the French
solution, before coming to the solution at Chartres.

The cathedral at Coutances is said to be about the age of the Mer-
veille (1200-50), but the exact dates are unknown, and the work is so
Norman as to stand by itself; yet the architect has grappled with
more problems than one need hope to see solved in any single church

COUTANXES CATHEDR.\L

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 47

in the He de France. Even at Chartres, although the two stone filches
are, by exception, completed, they are not of the same age, as they are
here. Neither at Chartres nor at Paris, nor at Laon or Amiens or
Rheims or Bourges, will you see a central tower to compare with the
enormous pile at Coutances. Indeed the architects of France failed to
solve this particular church problem, and we shall leave it behind us
in leaving Normandy, although it is the most effective feature of any
possible church. "A clocher of that period (circa 1200), built over the
croisee of a cathedral, following lines so happy, should be a monument
of the greatest beauty; unfortunately we possess not a single one in
France. Fire, and the hand of man more than time, have destroyed
them all, and we find on our greatest religious edifices no more than
bases and fragments of these beautiful constructions. The cathedral
of Coutances alone has preserved its central clocher of the thirteenth
century, and even there it is not complete; its stone fleche is wanting.
As for its style, it belongs to Norman architecture, and diverges widely
from the character of French architecture." So says Viollet-le-Duc;
but although the great churches for the most part never had central
clochers, which, on the scale of Amiens, Bourges, or Beauvais, would
have required an impossible mass, the smaller churches frequently
carry them still, and they are, like the dome, the most effective features
they can carry. They were made to dominate the whole.

No doubt the fleche is wanting at Coutances, but you can supply
it in imagination from the two filches of the western tower, which are as
simple and severe as the spear of a man-at-arms. Supply the fleche,
and the meaning of the tower cannot be mistaken ; it is as military as
the "Chanson de Roland"; it is the man-at-arms himself, mounted
and ready for battle, spear in rest. The mere seat of the central tower
astride of the church, so firm, so fixed, so serious, so defiant, is Norman,
like the seat of the Abbey Church on the Mount ; and at Falaise, where
William the Bastard was born, we shall see a central tower on the
church which is William himself, in armour, on horseback, ready to

48 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

fight for the Church, and perhaps, in his bad moods, against it. Such
militant churches were capable of forcing Heaven itself; all of them
look as though they had fought at Hastings or stormed Jerusalem.
Wherever the Norman central clocher stands, the Church Militant of
the eleventh century survives; — not the Church of Mary Queen, but
of Michael the Archangel ; — not the Church of Christ, but of God the
Father — Who never lied !

Taken together with the filches of the fagade, this clocher of Cou-
tances forms a group such as one very seldom sees. The two towers
of the fagade are something apart, quite by themselves among the
innumerable church-towers of the Gothic time. We have got a happy
summer before us, merely in looking for these church-towers. There is
no livelier amusement for fine weather than in hunting them as though
they were mushrooms, and no study in architecture nearly so delight-
ful. No work of man has life like the fieche. One sees it for a greater
distance and feels it for a longer time than is possible with any other
human structure, unless it be the dome. There is more play of light on
the octagonal faces of the fieche as the sun moves around them than
can be got out of the square or the cone or any other combination of
surfaces. For some reason, the facets of the hexagon or octagon are
more pleasing than the rounded surfaces of the cone, and Normandy is
said to be peculiarly the home of this particularly Gothic church
ornament; yet clochers and fleches are scattered all over France until
one gets to look for them on the horizon as though every church in
every hamlet were an architectural monument. Hundreds of them
literally are so, — Monuments Historiques, — protected by the
Government; but when you undertake to compare them, or to decide
whether they are more beautiful in Normandy than in the lie de
France, or in Burgundy, or on the Loire or the Charente, you are lost.
Even the superiority of the octagon is not evident to everyone. Over
the little church at Fenioux on the Charente, not very far from La
Rochelle, is a conical steeple that an infidel might adore; and if you

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 49

have to decide between provinces, you must reckon with the decision
of architects and amateurs, who seem to be agreed that the first of all
filches is at Chartres, the second at Vend6me, not far from Blois in
Touraine, and the third at Auxerre in Burgundy. The towers of
Coutances are not in the list, nor are those at Bayeux nor those at
Caen. France is rich in art. Yet the towers of Coutances are in some
ways as interesting, if not as beautiful, as the best.

The two stone filches here, with their octagon faces, do not descend,
as in other churches, to their resting-place on a square tower, with the
plan of junction more or less disguised; they throw out nests of smaller
filches, and these cover buttressing corner towers, with lines that go
directly to the ground. Whether the artist consciously intended it or
not, the effect is to broaden the facade and lift it into the air. The
fagade itself has a distinctly military look, as though a fortress had
been altered into a church. A charming arcade at the top has the air
of being thrown across in order to disguise the alteration, and perhaps
owes much of its charm to the contrast it makes with the severity of
military lines. Even the great west window looks like an afterthought ;
one's instinct asks for a blank wall. Yet, from the ground up to the
cross orl the spire, one feels the Norman nature throughout, animating
the whole, uniting it all, and crowding into it an intelligent variety of
original motives that would build a dozen churches of late Gothic.
Nothing about it is stereotyped or conventional, — not even the con-
ventionality.

If you have any doubts about this, you have only to compare the
photograph of Coutances with the photograph of Chartres; and yet,
surely, the facade of Chartres is severe enough to satisfy Saint Bernard
himself. With the later fronts of Rheims and Amiens, there is no field
for comparison; they have next to nothing in common; yet Coutances
is said to be of the same date with Rheims, or nearly so, and one can
believe it when one enters the interior. The Normans, as they slowly
reveal themselves, disclose most unexpected qualities; one seems to

50 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

sound subterranean caverns of feeling hidden behind their iron nasals.
No other cathedral in France or in Europe has an interior more re-
fined — one is tempted to use even the hard-worn adjective, more
tender — or more carefully studied. One test is crucial here and every-
where. The treatment of the apse and choir is the architect's severest
standard. This is a subject not to be touched lightly; one to which we
shall have to come back in a humble spirit, prepared for patient study,
at Chartres; but the choir of Coutances is a cousin to that of Chartres,
as the fagades are cousins; Coutances like Chartres belongs to Notre
Dame and is felt in the same spirit ; the church is built for the choir and
apse, rather than for the nave and transepts; for the Virgin rather than
for the public. In one respect Coutances is even more delicate in the
feminine charm of the Virgin's peculiar grace than Chartres, but this
was an afterthought of the fourteenth century. The system of chapels
radiating about the apse was extended down the nave, in an arrange-
ment "so beautiful and so rare," according to Viollet-le-Duc, that one
shall seek far before finding its equal. Among the unexpected revela-
tions of human nature that suddenly astonish historians, one of the
least reasonable was the passionate outbreak of religious devotion to
the ideal of feminine grace, charity, and love that took place here in
Normandy while it was still a part of the English kingdom, and
flamed up into almost fanatical frenzy among the most hard-hearted
and hard-headed race in Europe.

So in this church, in the centre of this arrangement of apse and
chapels with their quite unusual — perhaps quite singular — grace,
the four huge piers which support the enormous central tower, offer a
tour de force almost as exceptional as the refinement of the chapels.
At Mont-Saint-Michel, among the monks, the union of strength and
grace was striking, but at Coutances it is exaggerated, like Tristram
and Iseult, — a roman of chivalry. The four "enormous" columns of
the croisee, carry, as Viollet-le-Duc says, the "enormous octagonal
tower," — like Saint Christopher supporting the Christ-child, before

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 51

the image of the Virgin, in her honour. Nothing like this can be seen
at Chartres, or at any of the later palaces which France built for the
pleasure of the Queen of Heaven.

We are slipping into the thirteenth century again; the temptation is
terrible to feeble minds and tourist natures; but a great mass of twelfth-
and eleventh-century work remains to be seen and felt. To go back is
not so easy as to begin with it ; the heavy round arch is like old cognac
compared with the champagne of the pointed and fretted spire; one
must not quit Coutances without making an excursion to Lessay on the
road to Cherbourg, where is a church of the twelfth century, with a
square tower and almost untouched Norman interior, that closely
repeats the Abbey Church at Mont-Saint-Michel. "One of the most
complete models of Romanesque architecture to be found in Nor-
mandy," says M. de Caumont. The central clocher will begin a pho-
tographic collection of square towers, to replace that which was lost
on the Mount; and a second example is near Bayeux, at a small place
called Cerisy-la-For§t, where the church matches that on the Mount,
according to M. Corroyer; for Cerisy-la-For6t was also an abbey, and
thechurch, built by Richard II, Dukeof Normandy, at the beginning
of the eleventh century, was larger than that on the Mount. It still
keeps its central tower.

\ All this is intensely Norman, and is going to help very little in
France; it would be more useful in England; but at Bayeux is a great
cathedral much more to the purpose, with two superb western towers
crowned by stone filches, cousins of those at Coutances, and distinctly
related to the twelfth-century fl^che at Chartres. "The Normans,"
says Viollet-le-Duc, "had not that instinct of proportion which the
architects of the He de France, Beauvais, and Soissons possessed to a
high degree ; yet the boldness of their constructions, their perfect exe-
cution, the elevation of the filches, had evident influence on the
French school properly called, and that influence is felt in the old spire
of Chartres." The Norman seemed to show distinction in another

52 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

respect which the French were less quick to imitate. What they began,
they completed. Not one of the great French churches has two stone
spires complete, of the same age, while each of the little towns of
Coutances, Bayeux, and Caen contains its twin towers and fleches of
stone, as solid and perfect now as they were seven hundred years ago.
Still another Norman character is worth noting, because this is one
part of the influence felt at Chartres. If you look carefully at the two
western towers of the Bayeux Cathedral, perhaps you will feel what is
said to be the strength of the way they are built up. They rise from
their foundation with a quiet confidence of line and support, which
passes directly up to the weather-cock on the summit of the fleches.
At the plane where the square tower is changed into the octagon spire,
you will see the corner turrets and the long intermediate windows
which effect the change without disguising it. One can hardly call
it a device; it is so simple and evident a piece of construction that
it does not need to be explained ; yet you will have to carry a photo-
graph of this fleche to Chartres, and from there to Vendome, for there
is to be a great battle of fleches about this point of junction, and the
Norman scheme is a sort of standing reproach to the French.

Coutances and Bayeux are interesting, but Caen is a Romanesque
Mecca. There William the Conqueror dealt with the same architec-
tural problems, and put his solution in his Abbaye-aux-Hommes,
which bears the name of Saint Stephen. Queen Matilda put her solu-
tion into her Abbaye-aux-Femmes, the Church of the Trinity. One
ought particularly to look at the beautiful central clocher of the
church at Vaucelles in the suburbs; and one must drive out to Thaon
to see its eleventh-century church, with a charming Romanesque blind
arcade on the outside, and a little clocher, "the more interesting to us,"
according to Viollet-le-Duc, " because it bears the stamp of the tradi-
tions of defence of the primitive towers which were built over the
porches." Even "a sort of chemin de ronde" remains around the
clocher, perhaps once provided with a parapet of defence. "C'est lei,

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 53

du reste, un charmant Mifice." A tower with stone fl^che, which actu-
ally served for defence in a famous recorded instance, is that of the
church at Secqueville, not far off; this beautiful tower, as charming as
anything in Norman art, is known to have served as a fortress in 1 105,
which gives a valuable date. The pretty old Romanesque front of the
little church at Ouistreham, with its portal that seems to come fresh
from Poitiers and Moissac, can be taken in, while driving past; but we
must on no account fail to make a serious pilgrimage to Saint- Pierre-
sur-Dives, where the church-tower and fleche are not only classed
among the best in Normandy, but have an exact date, 1145, and a
very close relation with Chartres, as will appear. Finally, if for no
other reason, at least for interest in Arlette, the tanner's daughter, one
must go to Falaise, and look at the superb clocher of Saint-Gervais,
which was finished and consecrated by 1 135.

Some day, if you like, we can follow this Romanesque style to the
south, and on even to Italy where it may be supposed to have been
born ; but France had an architectural life fully a thousand years old
when these twelfth-century churches were built, and was long since
artistically, as she was politically, independent. The Normans were
new in~ France, but not the Romanesque architecture ; they only took
the forms and stamped on them their own character. It is the stamp
we want to distinguish, in order to trace up our lines of artistic ances-
try. The Norman twelfth-century stamp was not easily effaced. If we
have not seen enough of it at Mont-Saint-Michel, Coutances, Bayeux,
and Caen, we can go to Rouen, and drive out to Boscherville, and
visit the ruined Abbey of Jumi^ges. Wherever there is a church-tower
with a tall fl^he, as at Boscherville, Secqueville, Saint-Pierre-sur-
Div^es, Caen, and Bayeux, Viollet-le-Duc bids notice how the octag-
onal steeple is fitted on to the square tower. Always the passage from
the octagon to the square seems to be quite simply made. The Gothic
or Romanesque spire had the advantage that a wooden fleche was as
reasonable a covering for it as a stone one, and the Normans might

54 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

have indulged in freaks of form very easily, if they chose, but they
seem never to have thought of it. The nearest approach to the free-
dom of wooden roofs is not in the lofty fleches, but in the covering of
the great square central towers, like Falaise or Vaucelles, a huge four-
sided roof which tries to be a fltehe, and is as massive as the heavy
structure it covers.

The last of the Norman towers that Viollet-le-Duc insists upon is
the so-called Clocher de Saint- Romain, the northern tower on the west
front of the Cathedral of Rouen. Unfortunately it has lost its primi-
tive octagon fl^che if it ever had one, but "the tower remains entire,
and," according to Viollet-le-Duc, "is certainly one of the most beau-
tiful in this part of France ; it offers a mixture of the two styles of the
He de France and of Normandy, in which the former element domin-
ates"; it is of the same date as the old tower of Chartres (1140-60),
and follows the same interior arrangement; "but here the petty, con-
fused disposition of the Norman towers, with their division into
stories of equal height, has been adopted by the French master
builder, although in submitting to these local customs he has still
thrown over his work the grace and finesse, the study of detail, the
sobriety in projections, the perfect harmony between the profiles,
sculpture, and the general effect of the whole, which belong to the
school he came from. He has managed his voids and solids with
especial cleverness, giving the more importance to the voids, and
enlarging the scale of his details, as the tower rose in height. These
details have great beauty; the construction is executed in materials of
small dimensions with the care that the twelfth-century architects put
into their building; the profiles project little, and, in spite of their
extreme finesse, produce much effect; the buttresses are skilfully
planted and profiled. The staircase, which, on the east side, deranges
the arrangement of the bays, is a chef-d'oeuvre of architecture." This
long panegyric, by Viollet-le-Duc, on French taste at the expense of
Norman temper, ought to be read, book in hand, before the Cathedral

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 55

of Rouen, with photographs of Bayeux to compare. Certain it is that
the Normans and the French never talked quite. the same language, but
it is equally certain that the Norman language, to the English ear,
expressed itself quite as clearly as the French, and sometimes seemed
to have more to express.

The complaint of the French artist against the Norman is the
"mesquin" treatment of dividing his tower into storeys of equal
height. Even in the twelfth century and in religious architecture,
artists already struggled over the best solution of this particularly
American problem of the twentieth century, and when tourists return
to New York, they may look at the twenty-storey towers which deco-
rate the city, to see whether the Norman or the French plan has won;
but this, at least, will be sure in advance: — the Norman will be the
practical scheme which states the facts, and stops; while the French
will be the graceful one, which states the beauties, and more or less
fits the facts to suit them. Both styles are great : both can sometimes
be tiresome.

Here we must take leave of Normandy; a small place, but one
which, like Attica or Tuscany, has said a great deal to the world, and
even goes on saying things — not often in the famous genre ennuyeux
— to this day; for Gustave Flaubert's style is singularly like that of
the Tour Saint- Romain and the Abbaye-aux-Hommes. Going up the
Seine one might read a few pages of his letters, or of " Madame de
Bovary," to see how an old art transmutes itself into a new one, with-
out changing its methods. Some critics have thought that at times
Flaubert was mesquin like the Norman tower, but these are, as the
French say, the defects of his qualities; we can pass over them, and
let our eyes rest on the simplicity of the Norman fleche which pierces
the line of our horizon.

The last of Norman art is seen at Mantes, where there is a little
church of Gassicourt that marks the farthest reach of the style. In
arms as in architecture. Mantes barred the path of Norman conquest;

56 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

William the Conqueror met his death here in 1087. Geographically
Mantes is in the lie de France, less than forty miles from Paris.
Architecturally, it is Paris itself; while, forty miles to the southward,
is Chartres, an independent or only feudally dependent country. No
matter how hurried the architectural tourist may be, the boundary-
line of the lie de France is not to be crossed without stopping. If he
came down from the north or east, he would have equally to stop, —
either at Beauvais, or at Laon, or Noyon, or Soissons, — because there
is an architectural douane to pass, and one's architectural baggage
must be opened. Neither Notre Dame de Paris nor Notre Dame de
Chartres is quite intelligible unless one has first seen Notre Dame de
Mantes, and studied it in the sacred sources of M. Viollet-le-Duc.

Notre Dame de Mantes is a sister to the Cathedral of Paris, "built
at the same time, perhaps by the same architect, and reproducing its
general dispositions, its mode of structure, and some of its details";
but the Cathedral of Paris has been greatly altered, so that its original
arrangement is quite changed, while the church at Mantes remains
practically as it was, when both were new, about the year 1200. As
nearly as the dates can be guessed, the cathedral was finished, up to
its vaulting, in 1170, and was soon afterwards imitated on a smaller
scale at Mantes. The scheme seems to have been unsatisfactory
because of defects in the lighting, for the whole system of fenestration
had been changed at Paris before 1230, naturally at great cost, since
the alterations, according to Viollet-le-Duc (articles "Cathedral" and
" Rose," and allusions "Triforium"), left little except the ground-plan
unchanged. To understand the Paris design of 1160-70, which was a
long advance from the older plans, one must come to Mantes; and,
reflecting that the great triumph of Chartres was its fenestration,
which must have been designed immediately after 1 195, one can under-
stand how, in this triangle of churches only forty or fifty miles apart,
the architects, watching each other's experiments, were influenced,
almost from day to day, by the failures or successes which they saw

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 57

The fenestration which the Paris architect planned in 1160-70, and
repeated at Mantes, 1 190-1200, was wholly abandoned, and a new
system introduced, immediately after the success of Chartres in 12 10.

As they now stand. Mantes is the oldest. While conscientiously
trying to keep as far away as we can from technique, about which we
know nothing and should care if possible still less if only ignorance
would help us to feel what we do not understand, still the conscience
is happier if it gains a little conviction, founded on what it thinks a
fact. Even theologians — even the great theologians of the thirteenth
century — even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself — did not trust to
faith alone, or assume the existence of God; and what Saint Thomas
found necessary in philosophy may also be a sure source of consolation
in the difficulties of art. The church at Mantes is a very early fact in
Gothic art; indeed, it is one of the earliest; for our purposes it will
serve as the very earliest of pure Gothic churches, after the Transition,
and this we are told to study in its windows.

Before one can get near enough fairly to mark the details of the
fagade, one sees the great rose window which fills a space nearly
twenty-seven feet in width. Gothic fanatics commonly reckon the
great rose windows of the thirteenth century as the most beautiful
creation of their art, among the details of ornament; and this particu-
lar rose is the direct parent of that at Chartres, which is classic like
the Parthenon, while both of them served as models or guides for that
at Paris which dates from 1220, those in the north and south transepts
at Rheims, about 1230, and so on, from parent to child, till the rose
faded forever. No doubt there were Romanesque roses before 1200,
and we shall see them, but this rose of Mantes is the first Gothic rose
of great dimensions, and that from which the others grew; in its sim-
plicity, its honesty, its large liberality of plan, it is also one of the best,
if M. Viollet-le-Duc is a true guide; but you will see a hundred roses,
fiirst or last, and can choose as you would among the flowers.

More interesting than even the great rose of the portal is the remark

58 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

that the same rose-motive is carried round the church throughout its
entire system of fenestration. As one follows it, on the outside, one
sees that all the windows are constructed on the same rose-scheme; but
the most curious arrangement is in the choir inside the church. You
look up to each of the windows through a sort of tunnel or telescope:
an arch enlarging outwards, the roses at the end resembling "oeil-de-
boeufs," "oculi." So curious is this arrangement that Viollet-le-Duc
has shown it, under the head "Triforium," in drawings and sections
which any one can study who likes; its interest to us is that this
arrangement in the choir was probably the experiment which proved
a failure in Notre Dame at Paris, and led to the tearing-out the old
windows and substituting those which still stand. Perhaps the rose
did not give enough light, although the church at Mantes seems well
lighted, and even at Paris the rose windows remain in the transepts
and in one bay of the nave.

All this is introduction to the windows of Chartres, but these three
churches open another conundrum as one learns, bit by bit, a few of
the questions to be asked of the forgotten Middle Ages. The church-
towers at Mantes are very interesting, inside and out; they are evi-
dently studied with love and labour by their designer; yet they have
no fleches. How happens it that Notre Dame at Paris also has no
fleches, although the towers, according to Viollet-le-Duc, are finished
in full preparation for them? This double omission on the part of the
French architect seems exceedingly strange, because his rival at
Chartres finished his fl^che just when the architect of Paris and
Mantes was finishing his towers (1175-1200). The Frenchman was
certainly consumed by jealousy at the triumph never attained on any-
thing like the same scale by any architect of the lie de France; and he
was actually engaged at the time on at least two fleches, close to Paris,
one at Saint-Denis, another of Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, which proved
the active interest he took in the difficulties conquered at Chartres,
and his perfect competence to deal with them.

CAEN: THE "ABBA YE AUX DAMES"

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 59

Indeed, one is tempted to say that these twin churches, Paris and
Mantes, are the only French churches of the time (1200) which were
left without a fl^che. As we go from Mantes to Paris, we pass, about
half-way, at Poissy, under the towers of a very ancient and interesting
church which has the additional merit of having witnessed the bap-
tism of Saint Louis in 12 15. Parts of the church at Poissy go back to
the seventh and ninth centuries. The square base of the tower dates
back before the time of Hugh Capet, to the Carolingian age, and
belongs, like the square tower of Saint-Germain-des-Pres at Paris, to
the old defensive military architecture; but it has a later, stone fleche
and it has, too, by exception a central octagonal clocher, with a timber
fleche which dates from near 1 100. Paris itself has not much to show,
but in the immediate neighbourhood are a score of early churches
with charming filches, and at fitampes, about thirty-five miles to the
south, is an extremely interesting church with an exquisite fleche,
which may claim an afternoon to visit. That at Saint-Leu-d'Esserent
is a still easier excursion, for one need only drive over from Chantilly
a couple of miles. The fascinating old Abbey Church of Saint-Leu
looks down over the valley of the Oise, and is a sort of antechamber to
Chartres, as far as concerns architecture. Its fleche, built towards
1 160, — when that at Chartres was rising, — is unlike any other, and
shows how much the French architects valued their lovely French
creation. On its octagonal faces, it carries upright batons, or lances,
as a device for relieving the severity of the outlines; a device both
intelligent and amusing, though it was never imitated. A little farther
from Paris, at Senlis, is another fleche, which shows still more plainly
the effort of the French architects to vary and elaborate the Chartres
scheme. As for Laon, which is interesting throughout, and altogether
the most delightful building in the lie de France, the fleches are gone,
but the towers are there, and you will have to study them, before study-
ing those at Chartres, with all the intelligence you have to spare. They
were the chef-d'oeuvre of the mediaeval architect, in his own opinion.

6o MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

All this makes the absence of fleches at Paris and Mantes the more
strange. Want of money was certainly not the cause, since the Paris-
ians had money enough to pull their whole cathedral to pieces at the
very time when fleches were rising in half the towns within sight of
them. Possibly they were too ambitious, and could find no design that
seemed to satisfy their ambition. They took pride in their cathedral,
and they tried hard to make their shrine of Our Lady rival the great
shrine at Chartres. Of course, one must study their beautiful church,
but this can be done at leisure, for, as it stands, it Is later than
Chartres and more conventional. Salnt-Germain-des-Pres leads more
directly to Chartres; but perhaps the church most useful to know Is no
longer a church at all, but a part of the Museum of Arts et Metiers, —
the desecrated Salnt-Martin-des-Champs, a name which shows that
it dates from a time when the present Porte-Saint-Martin was far out
among fields. The choir of Saint-Martin, which is all that needs noting,
is said by M. Enlart to date from about 1150. Hidden in a remnant
of old Paris near the Pont Notre Dame, where the student life of the
Middle Ages was to be most turbulent and the Latin Quarter most
renowned, is the little church of Saint- JulIen-le-Pauvre, towards 11 70.
On the whole, further search in Paris would not greatly help us. If one
is to pursue the early centuries, one must go farther afield, for the
schools of Normandy and the He de France were only two among half
a dozen which flourished In the various provinces that were to be
united In the kingdom of Saint Louis and his successors. We have not
even looked to the south and east, whence the Impulse came. The old
Carollngian school, with Its centre at Alx-la-Chapelle, is quite beyond
our horizon. The Rhine had a great Romanesque architecture of its
own. One broad architectural tide swept up the Rhone and filled the
Burgundlan provinces as far as the watershed of the Seine. Another
lined the Mediterranean, with a centre at Aries. Another spread up
the western rivers, the Charente and the Loire, reaching to Le Mans
and touching Chartres. Two more lay in the centre of France, spread-

NORMANDY AND THE ILE DE FRANCE 61

ing from Perigord and Clermont in Auvergne. All these schools had
individual character, and all have charm; but we have set out to go
from Mont-Saint-Michel to Chartres in three centuries, the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth, trying to get, on the way, not technical knowl-
edge; not accurate information; not correct views either on history,
art, or religion; not anything that can possibly be useful or instructive;
but only a sense of what those centuries had to say, and a sympathy
with their ways of saying it. Let us go straight to Chartres!

CHAPTER V

TOWERS AND PORTALS

FOR a first visit to Chartres, choose some pleasant morning when
the Hghts are soft, for one wants to be welcome, and the cathe-
dral has moods, at times severe. At best, the Beauce is a country none
too gay.

The first glimpse that is caught, and the first that was meant to be
caught, is that of the two spires. With all the education that Nor-
mandy and the He de France can give, one is still ignorant. The spire
is the simplest part of the Romanesque or Gothic architecture, and
needs least study in order to be felt. It is a bit of sentiment almost pure
of practical purpose. It tells the whole of its story at a glance, and its
story is the best that architecture had to tell, for it typified the aspira-
tions of man at the moment when man's aspirationslwere highest. Yet
nine persons out of ten — perhaps ninety-nine in a hundred — who
come within sight of the two spires of Chartres will think it a jest if
they are told that the smaller of the two, the simpler, the one that
impresses them least, is the one which they are expected to recognize
as the most perfect piece of architecture in the world. Perhap the
French critics might deny that they make any such absolute claim;
in that case you can ask them what their exact claim is; it will always
be high enough to astonish the tourist.

Astonished or not, we have got to take this southern spire of the
Chartres Cathedral as the object of serious study, and before taking it
as art, must take it as history. The foundations of this tower —
always to be known as the "old tower" — are supposed to have been
laid in 1 091, before the first crusade. The fleche was probably half a
century later (i 145-70). The foundations of the new tower, opposite,
were laid not before mo, when also the portal which stands between

CHARTRES CATHEDRAL

TOWERS AND PORTALS 63

them, was begun with the three lancet windows above it, but not the
rose. For convenience, this old fagade — including the portal and the
two towers, but not the filches, and the three lancet windows, but not
the rose — may be dated as complete about 11 50.

X)nginally the whole portal — the three doors and the three lancets
— stood nearly forty feet back, on the line of the interior foundation,
or rear wall of the towers. This arrangement threw the towers forward,
free on three sides, as at Poitiers, and gave room for a parvis, before
the portal, — a porch, roofed over, to protect the pilgrims who always
stopped there to pray before entering the church. When the church
was rebuilt after the great fire of 11 94, and the architect was required
to enlarge the interior, the old portal and lancets were moved bodily
forward, to be flush with the front walls of the two towers, as you see
the fagade to-day; and the fagade itself was heightened, to give room
for the rose, and to cover the loftier pignon and vaulting behind.
Finally, the wooden roof, above the stone vault, was masked by the
Arcade of Kings and its railing, completed in the taste of Philip the
Hardy, who reigned from 1270 to 1285.

These changes have, of course, altered the values of all the parts.
The portal is injured by being thrown into a glare of light, when it
was intended to stand in shadow, as you will see in the north and south
porches over the transept portals. The towers are hurt by losing relief
and shadow; but the old fl^che is obliged to suffer the cruellest wrong
of all by having its right shoulder hunched up by half of a huge rose
and the whole of a row of kings, when it was built to stand free, and to
soar above the whole fagade from the top of its second storey. One can
easily figure it so and replace the lost parts of the old fagade, more or
less at haphazard, from the front of Noyon.

What an outrage it was you can see by a single glance at the new
fleche opposite. The architect of 1500 has flatly refused to submit to
such conditions, and has insisted, with very proper self-respect, on
starting from the balustrade of the Arcade of Kings as his level. Not

64 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

even content with that, he has carried up his square tower another lofty
storey before he would consent to touch the heart of his problem, the
conversion of the square tower into the octagon fleche. In doing this,
he has sacrificed once more the old fleche; but his own tower stands free
as it should.

At VendOme, when you go there, you will be in a way to appreciate
still better what happened to the Chartres fleche; for the clocher at
Vendome, which is of the same date, — VioUet-le-Duc says earlier,
and Enlart, " after 1 130, " — stood and still stands free, like an Italian
campanile, which gives it a vast advantage. The tower of Saint-Leu-
d'Esserent, also after 1130, stands free, above the second storey.
Indeed, you will hardly find, in the long list of famous French spires,
another which has been treated with so much indignity as this, the
greatest and most famous of all ; and perhaps the most annoying part
of it is that you must be grateful to the architect of 1195 for doing no
worse. He has, on the contrary, done his best to show respect for the
work of his predecessor, and has done so well that, handicapped as it is,
the old tower still defies rivalry. Nearly three hundred and fifty feet
high, or, to be exact, 106.5 metres from the church floor, it is built up
with an amount of intelligence and refinement that leaves to unpro-
fessional visitors no chance to think a criticism — much less to express
one. Perhaps — when we have seen more — and feel less — who
knows? — but certainly not now!

"The greatest and surely the most beautiful monument of this
kind that we possess in France," says Viollet-le-Duc ; but although
an ignorant spectator must accept the architect's decision on a point
of relative merit, no one is compelled to accept his reasons, as final.
"There is no need to dwell," he continues, "upon the beauty and the
grandeur of composition in which the artist has given proof of rare
sobriety, where all the effects are obtained, not by ornaments, but by
the just and skilful proportion of the different parts. The transition, so
hard to adjust, between the square base and ,the octagon of the fl^he,

TOWERS AND PORTALS 65

is managed and carried out with an address which has not been sur-
passed in similar monuments." One stumbles a little at the word
"adresse." One never caught one's self using the word in Norman
churches. Your photographs of Bayeux or Boscherville or Secque-
ville will show you at a glance whether the term "adresse" applies
to them. Even Vendome would rather be praised for "droiture" than
for "adresse." — Whether the word "adresse" means cleverness, dex-
terity, adroitness, or simple technical skill, the thing itself is some-
thing which the French have always admired more than the Normans
ever did. Viollet-le-Duc himself seems to be a little uncertain whether
to lay most stress on the one or the other quality; "If one tries to
appreciate the conception of this tower," quotes the Abbe Bulteau
(11, 84), "one will see that it is as frank as the execution is simple
and skilful. Starting from the bottom, one reaches the summit of the
fl^che without marked break; without anything to interrupt the gen-
eral form of the building. This clocher, whose base is broad (pleine),
massive, and free from ornament, transforms itself, as it springs, into
a sharp spire with eight faces, without its being possible to say where
the massive construction ends and the light construction begins."

Granting, as one must, that this concealment of the transition is a
beauty, one would still like to be quite sure that the Chartres scheme is
the best. The Norman clochers being thrown out, and that at Ven-
dome being admittedly simple, the Clocher de Saint-Jean on the
Church of Saint-Germain at Auxerre seems to be thought among the
next in importance, although it is only about one hundred and sixty
feet in height (forty-nine metres), and therefore hardly in the same
class with Chartres. Any photograph shows that the Auxerre spire is
also simple; and that at £tampes you have seen already to be of the
Vend6me rather than of the Chartres type. The clocher at Senlis is
more "habile"; it shows an effort to be clever, and offers a standard
of comparison ; but the mediaeval architects seem to have thought that
none of them bore rivalry with Laon for technical skill. One of these

66 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

professional experts, named Villard de Honnecourt, who lived between
1 200 and 1250, left a notebook which you can see in the vitrines of the
Biblioth^que Nationale in the Rue Richelieu, and which is the source
of most that is known about the practical ideas of mediaeval architects.
He came to Chartres, and, standing here before the doors, where we
are standing, he made a rough drawing, not of the tower, but pf the
rose, which was then probably new, since it must have been planned
between 1195 and 1200. Apparently the tower did not impress him
strongly, for he made no note of it; but on the other hand, when he
went to Laon, he became vehement in praise of the cathedral tower
there, which must have been then quite new: "I have been in many
countries, as you can find in this book. In no place have I ever such a
tower seen as that of Laon. — J'ai est6 en mult de tieres, si cum vus
pores trover en cest livre. En aucun liu onques tel tor ne vi com est
cele de Loon." The reason for this admiration is the same that Viollet-
le-Duc gives for admiring the tower of Chartres — the "adresse" with
which the square is changed into the octagon. Not only is the tower
itself changed into the fl^che without visible junction, under cover of
four corner tourelles, of open work, on slender columns, which start as
squares; but the tourelles also convert themselves into octagons in the
very act of rising, and end in octagon fleches that carry up — or once
carried up — the lines of profile to the central fleche that soared abovti
them. Clearly this device far surpassed in cleverness the scheme of
Chartres, which was comparatively heavy and structural, the weights
being adjusted for their intended work, while the transformation at
Laon takes place in the air, and challenges discovery in defiance of
one's keenest eyesight. " Regard . . . how the tourelles pass from one
disposition to another, in rising! Meditate on it!"

The fl^he of Laon is gone, but the tower and tourelles are still there
to show what the architects of the thirteenth century thought their
most brilliant achievement. One cannot compare Chartres directly
with any of its contemporary rivals, but one can at least compare the

TOWERS AND PORTALS 67

old spire with the new one which stands opposite and rises above it.
Perhai>s you will like the new best. Built at a time which is commonly
agreed to have had the highest standard of taste, it does not encourage
tourist or artist to insist on setting up standards of his own against it.
Begun in 1507, it was finished in 151 7. The dome of Saint Peter's at
Rome, over which Bramante and Raphael and Michael Angelo toiled,
was building at the same time; Leonardo da Vinci was working at
Amboise; Jean Bullant, Pierre Lescot, and their patron, Francis I,
were beginning their architectural careers. Four hundred years, or
thereabouts, separated the old spire from the new one; and four hun-
dred more separate the new one from us. If Viollet-le-Duc, who him-
self built Gothic spires, had cared to compare his filches at Clermont-
Ferrand with the new fleche at Chartres, he might perhaps have given
us a rule where "adresse" ceases to have charm, and where detail
becomes tiresome ; but in the want of a schoolmaster to lay down a law
of taste, you can admire the new fleche as much as you please. Of
course, one sees that the lines of the new tower are not clean, like those
of the old; the devices that cover the transition from the square to the
xrtagon are rather too obvious; the proportion of the fleche to the tower
quite alters the values of the parts; a rigid classical taste might even go
so far as to hint that the new tower, in comparison with the old, showed
signs of a certain tendency toward a dim and distant vulgarity. There
can be no harm in admitting that the new tower is a little wanting in
repose for a tower whose business is to counterpoise the very classic
lines of the old one; but no law compels you to insist on absolute repose
in any form of art; if such a law existed, it would have to deal with
Michael Angelo before it dealt with us. The new tower has many
faults, but it has great beauties, as you can prove by comparing it with
other late Gothic spires, including those of Viollet-le-Duc. Its chief
fault is to be where it is. As a companion to the crusades and to Saint
Bernard, it lacks austerity. As a companion to the Virgin of Chartres,
it recalls Diane de Poitiers.

68 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

In fact, the new tower, which in years is four centuries younger than
its neighbour, is in feeling fully four hundred years older. It is self-
conscious if not vain ; its coiffure is elaborately arranged to cover the
effects of age, and its neck and shoulders are covered with lace and
jewels to hide a certain sharpness of skeleton. Yet it may be beautiful,
still; the poets derided the wrinkles of Diane de Poitiers at the very
moment when King Henry II idealized her with the homage of a Don
Quixote ; an atmosphere of physical beauty and decay hangs about the
whole Renaissance.

One cannot push these resemblances too far, even for the twelfth
century and the old tower. Exactly what date the old tower repre-
sents, as a social symbol, is a question that might be as much disputed
as the beauty of Diane de Poitiers, and yet half the interest of archi-
tecture consists in the sincerity of its reflection of the society that
builds. In mere time, by actual date, the old tower represents the
second crusade, and when, in 1 150, Saint Bernard was elected chief of
that crusade in this very cathedral, — or rather, in the cathedral of
1 1 20, which was burned, — the workmen were probably setting in mor-
tar the stones of the fleche as we now see them ; yet the fl^che does not
represent Saint Bernard in feeling, for Saint Bernard held the whole
array of church-towers in horror as signs merely of display, wealth
and pride. The fleche rather represents Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis,
Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny, Abbot Abelard of Saint-Gildas-de-
Rhuys, and Queen Eleanor of Guienne, who had married Louis-le-
Jeune in 1 137; who had taken the cross from Saint Bernard in 1147;
who returned from the Holy Land in 11 49; and who compelled Saint
Bernard to approve her divorce in 1 152. Eleanor and Saint Bernard
were centuries apart, yet they lived at the same time and in the same
church. Speaking exactly, the old tower represents neither of them ;
the new tower itself is hardly more florid than Eleanor was; perhaps
less so, if one can judge from the fashions of the court-dress of her
time. The old tower is almost Norman, while Eleanor was wholly

TOWERS AND PORTALS 69

Gascon, and Gascony was always florid without being always correct.
The new tower, if it had been built in 1150, like the old one, would
have expressed Eleanor perfectly, even in height and apparent effort
to dwarf its mate, except that Eleanor dwarfed her husband without
an effort, and both in art and in history the result lacked harmony.

Be the contrast what it may, it does not affect the fact that no other
church in France has two spires that need be discussed in comparison
with these. Indeed, no other cathedral of the same class has any spires
at all, and this superiority of Chartres gave most of its point to a
saying that "with the spires of Chartres, the choir of Beauvais, the
nave of Amiens, and the fagade of Rheims," one could make a perfect
church — for us tourists.

_The towers have taken much time, though they are the least
religious and least complicated part of church circhitecture, and in no
way essential to the church ; indeed, Saint Bernard thought them an
excrescence due to pride and worldliness, and this is merely Saint
Bernard's way of saying that they were an ornament created to
gratify the artistic sense of beauty. Beautiful as they are, one's eyes
must drop at last down to the church itself. If the spire symbolizes
aspiration, the door symbolizes the way; and the portal of Chartres is
the type of French doors; it stands first in the history of Gothic art;
and, in the opinion of most Gothic artists, first in the interest of all
art, though this is no concern of ours. Here is the Way to Eternal Life
as it was seen by the Church and the Art of the first crusade!

The fortune of this monument has been the best attested Miracle
de la Vierge in the long list of the Virgin's miracles, for it comes down,
practically unharmed, through what may with literal accuracy be
called the jaws of destruction and the flames of hell. ..Built some time
-in- the first half of the twelfth century, it passed, apparently un-
scathed, through the great fire of 11 94 which burnt out the church
behind, and even the timber interior of the towers in front of it.
Owing to the enormous mass of timber employed in the structure of

70 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

the great churches, these recurrent fires were as destructive as fire can
be made, yet not only the portals with their statuary and carving, but^
also the lancet windows with their glass, escaped the flames; and,
what is almost equally strange, escaped also the hand of the builder
afterwards, who, if he had resembled other architects, would have
made a new front of his own, but who, with piety unexampled,
tenderly took the old stones down, one by one, and replaced them
forty feet in advance of their old position. The English wars and the
wars of religion brought new dangers, sieges, and miseries; the revolu-
tion of 1792 brought actual rapine and waste; boys have flung stoner
at the saints; architects have wreaked their taste within and without'
fire after fire has calcined the church vaults; the worst wrecker of all,
the restorer of the nineteenth century, has prowled about it; yet th*'
porch still stands, mutilated but not restored, burned but not con-
sumed, as eloquent a witness to the power and perfections of Our
Lady as it was seven hundred years ago, and perhaps more impressive.

You will see portals and porches more or less of the same period
elsewhere in many different places, — at Paris, Le Mans, Sens, Autun,
Vezelay, Clermont-Ferrand, Moissac, Aries, — a score of them ; for the
same piety has protected them more than once; but you will see no
other so complete or so instructive, and you may search far before you
will find another equally good in workmanship. Study of the Chartres
portal covers all the rest. The feeling and motive of all are nearly the
same, or vary only to suit the character of the patron saint; and the
point of all is that this feeling is the architectural child of the first
crusade. At Chartres one can read the first crusade in the portal, as at
Mont-Saint-Michel in the Aquilon and the promenoir.

The Abbe Bulteau gives reason for assuming the year 11 17 as the
approximate date of the sculpture about the west portal, and you saw
at Mont-Saint-Michel, in the promenoir of Abbot Roger II, an
accurately dated work of the same decade; but whatever the date of
the plan, the actual work and its spirit belong to 11 45 or thereabouts.

CHARTRES: DETAIL OF WEST PORTAL

TOWERS AND PORTALS 71

Some fifty years had passed since the crusaders streamed through
Constantinople to Antioch and Jerusalem, and they were daily going
and returning. You can see the ideas they brought back with the relics
and missals and enamels they bought in Byzantium. Over the central
door is the Christ, which might be sculptured after a Byzantine
enamel, with its long nimbus or aureole or glory enclosing the whole
figure. Over the left door is an Ascension, bearing the same stamp; and
over the right door, the seated Virgin, with her crown and her two
attendant archangels, is an empress. Here is the Church, the Way, and
the Life of the twelfth century that we have undertaken to feel, if not
to understand!

First comes the central doorway, and above it is the glory of Christ,
as the church at Chartres understood Christ in the year 1 1 50; for the
glories of Christ were many, and the Chartres Christ is one. Whatever
Christ may have been in other churches, here, on this portal, he offers
himself to his flock as the herald of salvation alone. Among all the
iniagery of these three doorways, there is no hint of fear, punish-
ment, or damnation, and this is the note of the whole time. Before
1200, the Church seems not to have felt the need of appealing hab-
itually to terror ; the promise of hope and happiness was enough ;
even the portal at Autun, which displays a Last Judgment, belonged
to Saint Lazarus the proof and symbol of resurrection. A hundred
years later, every church portal showed Christ not as Saviour but as
Judge, and He presided over a Last Judgment at Bourges and Amiens,
and here on the south portal, where the despair of the damned is the
evident joy of the artist, if it is not even sometimes a little his jest,
which is worse. At Chartres Christ is identified with His Mother, the
spirit of love and grace, and His Church is the Church Triumphant.

Not only is fear absent; there is not even a suggestion of pain; there
is not a martyr with the symbol of his martyrdom; and what is still
more striking, in the sculptured life of Christ, from the Nativity to the
Ascension, which adorns the capitals of the columns, the single scene

72 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

that has been omitted is the Crucifixion. There, as everywhere in this
portal, the artists seem actually to have gone out of their way in order
to avoid a suggestion of suffering. They have pictured Christ and His
Mother in all the other events of their lives; they have represented
evangelists; apostles; the twenty- four old men of the Apocalypse;
saints, prophets, kings, queens, and princes, by the score ; the signs of
the zodiac, and even the seven liberal arts: grammar, rhetoric, dia-
lectics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music; everything is
there except misery.

Perhaps Our Lady of Chartres was known to be peculiarly gracious
and gentle, and this may partially account also for the extreme popu-
larity of her shrine; but whatever the reason, her church was clearly
intended to show only this side of her nature, and to impress it on her
Son. You can see it in the grave and gracious face and attitude of the
Christ, raising His hand to bless you as you enter His kingdom; in the
array of long figures which line the entrance to greet you as you pass ;
in the expression of majesty and mercy of the Virgin herself on her
throne above the southern doorway; never once are you regarded as a
possible rebel, or traitor, or a stranger to be treated with suspicion, or
as a child to be impressed by fear.

Equally distinct, perhaps even more emphatic, is the sculptor's
earnestness to make you feel, without direct insistence, that you are
entering the Court of the Queen of Heaven who is one with her Son
and His Church. The central door always bore the name of the " Royal
Door," because it belonged to the celestial majesty of Christ, and
naturally bears the stamp of royalty; but the south door belongs to the
Virgin and to us. Stop a moment to see how she receives us, remem-
bering, or trying to remember, that to the priests and artists who
designed the portal, and to the generations that went on the first and
second crusades, the Virgin in her shrine was at least as living, as real,
as personal an empress as the Basilissa at Constantinople!

On the lintel immediately above the doorway is a succession of small

TOWERS AND PORTALS 73

groups: first, the Annunciation; Mary stands to receive the Archangel
Gabriel, who comes to announce to her that she is chosen to be the
Mother of God. The second is the Visitation, and in this scene also
Mary stands, but she already wears a crown; at least, the Abb6 Bul-
teau says so, although time has dealt harshly with it. Then, in the
centre, follows the Nativity; Mary lies on a low bed, beneath, or before,
a sort of table or cradle on which lies the Infant, while Saint Joseph
stands at the bed's head. Then the angel appears, directing three
shepherds to the spot, filling the rest of the space.

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed,
for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres
is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother,
the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to
share. The Virgin of Chartres was the greatest of all queens, but
the most womanly of women, as we shall see; and her double character
is sustained throughout her palace. She was also intellectually gifted
in the highest degree. In the upper zone you see her again, at the
Presentation in the Temple, supporting the Child Jesus on the altar,
while Simeon aids. Other figures bring offerings. The voussures of
the arch above contain six archangels, with curious wings, offering wor-
ship to the Infant and His Imperial Mother. Below are the signs of the
zodiac ; the Fishes and the Twins. The rest of the arch is filled by the
seven liberal arts, with Pythagoras, Aristotle, Cicero, Euclid, Nico-
machus, Ptolemy, and Priscian as their representatives, testifying to
the Queen's intellectual sup>eriority.

In the centre sits Mary, with her crown on her head and her Son in
her lap, enthroned, receiving the homage of heaven and earth; of all
time, ancient and modern; of all thought, Christian and Pagan; of all
men, and all women; including, if you please, your homage and mine,
which she receives without question, as her due; which she cannot be
said to claim, because she is above making claims; she is empress.
Her left hand bore a sceptre; her right supported the Child, Who looks

74 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

directly forward, repeating the Mother's attitude, and raises His right
hand to bless, while His left rests on the orb of empire. She and her
Child are one.

All this was noble beyond the nobility of man, but its earthly form
was inspired by the Empire rather than by the petty royalty of Louis-
le-Gros or his pious queen Alix of Savoy. One mark of the period is the
long, oval nimbus; another is the imperial character of the Virgin; a
third is her unity with the Christ which is the Church. To us, the
mark that will distinguish the Virgin of Chartres, or, if you prefer, the
Virgin of the Crusades, is her crown and robes and throne. According
to M. Rohault de Fleury's " Iconographie de la Sainte Vierge" (ii, 62),
the Virgin's headdress and ornaments had been for long ages borrowed
from the costume of the Empresses of the East in honour of the Queen
of Heaven. No doubt the Virgin of Chartres was the Virgin recog-
nized by the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, and was at least
as old as Helena's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 326. She was not a West-
ern, feudalqueen, nor was her Son a feudal king; she typified an author-
ity which the people wanted, and the fiefs feared; the Pax Romana; the
omnipotence of God in government. In all Europe, at that time, there
was no power able to enforce justice or to maintain order, and no sym-
bol of such a power except Christ and His Mother and the Imperial
Crown.

This idea is very different from that which was the object of our
pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel; but since all Chartres is to be one
long comment upon it, you can lay the history of the matter on the
shelf for study at your leisure, if you ever care to study into the weary
details of human illusions and disappointments, while here we pray to
the Virgin, and absorb ourselves in the art, which is your pleasure and
which shall not teach either a moral or a useful lesson. The Empress
Mary is receiving you at her portal, and whether you are an imperti-
nent child, or a foolish old peasant- woman, or an insolent prince, or a
more insolent tourist, she receives you with the same dignity; in fact.

TOWERS AND PORTALS 75

she probably sees very little diflference between you. An empress of
Russia to-day would probably feel little difference in the relative rank
of her subjects, and the Virgin was empress over emperors, patriarchs,
and popes. Any one, however ignorant, can feel the sustained dignity
of the sculptor's work, which is asserted with all the emphasis he could
put into it. Not one of these long figures which line the three doorways
but is an officer or official in attendance on the Empress or her Son,
and bears the stamp of the Imperial Court. They are mutilated, but,
if they have been treated with indignity, so were often their temporal
rivals, torn to pieces, trampled on, to say nothing of being merely
beheaded or poisoned, in the Sacred Palace and the Hippodrome, with-
out losing that peculiar Oriental dignity of style which seems to drape
the least dignified attitudes. The grand air of the twelfth century is
something like that of a Greek temple; you can, if you like, hammer
every separate stone to pieces, but you cannot hammer out the Greek
style. There were originally twenty-four of these statues, and nineteen
remain. Beginning at the north end, and passing over the first figure,
which carries a head that does not belong to it, notice the second, a
king with a long sceptre of empire, a book of law, and robes of Byzan-
tine official splendour. Beneath his feet is a curious woman's head with
heavy braids of hair, and a crown. The third figure is a queen, charm-
ing as a woman, but particularly well-dressed, and with details of orna-
ment and person elaborately wrought ; worth drawing, if one could only
draw; worth photographing with utmost care to include the strange
support on which she stands: a monkey, two dragons, a dog, a basilisk
with a dog's head. Two prophets follow — not so interesting ; —
prophets rarely interest. Then comes the central bay: two queens who
claim particular attention, then a prophet, then a saint next the door-
way; then on the southern jamb-shafts, another saint, a king, a queen,
and another king. Last comes the southern bay, the Virgin's own, and
there stands first a figure said to be a youthful king; then a strongly
sculptured saint; next the door a figure called also a king, but so

76 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

charmingly delicate in expression that the robes alone betray his sex;
and who this exquisite young aureoled king may have been who
stands so close to the Virgin, at her right hand, no one can now reveal.
Opposite him is a saint who may be, or should be, the Prince of the
Apostles; then a bearded king with a broken sceptre, standing on two
dragons; and, at last, a badly mutilated queen.

These statues are the Eginetan marbles of French art; from them all
modern French sculpture dates, or ought to date. They are singularly
interesting; as na'if as the smile on the faces of the Greek warriors, but
no more grotesque than they. You will see Gothic grotesques in
plenty, and you cannot mistake the two intentions; the twelfth cen-
tury would sooner have tempted the tortures of every feudal dungeon
in Europe than have put before the Virgin's eyes any figure that could
be conceived as displeasing to her. These figures are full of feeling,
and saturated with worship; but what is most to our purpose is the
feminine side which they proclaim and insist upon. Not only the
number of the female figures, and their beauty, but also the singularly
youthful beauty of several of the males; the superb robes they wear;
the expression of their faces and their figures; the details of hair,
stuffs, ornaments, jewels; the refinement and feminine taste of the
whole, are enough to startle our interest if we recognize what meaning
they had to the twelfth century.

These figures looked stiff and long and thin and ridiculous to enlight-
ened citizens of the eighteenth century, but they were made to fit the
architecture; if you want to know what an enthusiast thinks of them,
listen to M. Huysmans's "Cathedral." "Beyond a doubt, the most
beautiful sculpture in the world is in this place." He can hardly find
words to express his admiration for the queens, and particularly for the
one on the right of the central doorway. "Never in any period has a
more expressive figure been thus wrought by the genius of man; it is
the chef-d'oeuvre of infantile grace and holy candour. . . . She is the
elder sister of the Prodigal Son, the one of whom Saint Luke does not

TOWERS AND PORTALS 77

speak, but who, if she existed, would have pleaded the cause of the
absent, and insisted, with the father, that he should kill the fatted
calf at his son's return." The idea is charming if you are the returning
son, as many twelfth-century pilgrims must have thought themselves;
but, in truth, the figure is that of a queen; an Eleanor of Guienne; her
position there is due to her majesty, which bears witness to the celes-
tial majesty of the Court in which she is only a lady-in-waiting : and
she is hardly more humanly fascinating than her brother, the youth-
ful king at the Virgin's right hand, who has nothing of the Prodigal
Son, but who certainly has much of Lohengrin, or even — almost —
Tristan.

The Abbe Bulteau has done his best to name these statues, but the
names would be only in your way. That the sculptor meant them for
a Queen of Sheba or a King of Israel has little to do with their mean-
ing in the twelfth century, when the people were much more likely
to have named them after the queens and kings they knew. The whole
charm lies for us in the twelfth-century humanity of Mary and her
Court; not in the scriptural names under which it was made ortho-
dox. Here, in this western portal, it stands as the crusaders of 1 100-50
imagined it; but by walking round the church to the porch over the
entrance to the north transept, you shall see it again as Blanche of
Castile and Saint Louis imagined it, a hundred years later, so that you
will know better whether the earthly attributes are exaggerated or un-
true.

-•^ Porches, like steeples, were rather a peculiarity of French churches,
and were studied, varied, one might even say petted, by French archi-
tects to an extent hardly attempted elsewhere; but among all the
French porches, those of Chartres are the most famous. There are
two: one on the north side, devoted to the Virgin; the other, on the
south, devoted to the Son. "The mass of intelligence, knowledge,
acquaintance with effects, practical experience, expended on these
two porches of Chartres," says Viollet-le-Duc, "would be enough to.

78 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

establish the glory of a whole generation of artists." We begin with
the north porch because it belonged to the Virgin; and it belonged to
the Virgin because the north was cold, bleak, sunless, windy, and
needed warmth, peace, affection, and power to protect against the
assaults of Satan and his swarming devils. There the all-suffering
but the all-powerful Mother received other mothers who suffered like
her, but who, as a rule, were not powerful. Traditionally in the primi-
tive church, the northern porch belonged to the women. When they
needed help, they came here, because it was the only place in this world
or in any other where they had much hof>e of finding even a recep-
tion. See how Mary received them !

The porch extends the whole width of the transept, about one hun-
dred and twenty feet (37.65 metres), divided into three bays some
twenty feet deep, and covered with a stone vaulted roof supported on
piers outside. Begun toward 121 5 under Philip Augustus, the archi-
tectural part was finished toward 1225 under Louis VIII ; and after his
death in 1226, the decorative work and statuary were carried on
under the regency of his widow, Blanche of Castile, and through the
reign of her son, Saint Louis (1235-70), until about 1275, when thg
work was completed by Philip the Hardy. A gift of the royal family of
France, all the members of the family seem to have had a share in
building it, and several of their statues have been supposed to adorn
it. ' The walls are lined — the porch, in a religious sense, is inhabited
— by more than seven hundred figures, great and small, all, in one
way or another, devoted to the glory of the Queen of Heaven. You will
see that a hundred years have converted the Byzantine Empress into
a French Queen, as the same years had converted Alix of Savoy into
Blanche of Castile; but the note of majesty is the same, and the asser-
tion of power is, if possible, more emphatic.

The highest note is struck at once, in the central bay, over the door,
where you see the Coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven, a favour-
ite subject in art from very early times, and the dominant idea of

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TOWERS AND PORTALS 79

Mary's church You see Mary on the left, seated on her throne; on
the right, seated on a precisely similar throne, is Christ, Who holds
up His right hand apparently to bless, since Mary already bears the
crown. Mary bends forward, with her hands raised toward her Son,
as though in gratitude or adoration or prayer, but certainly not in
an attitude of feudal homage. On either side, an archangel swings a
censer.

On the lintel below, on the left, is represented the death of Mary^.
on the right, Christ carries, in the folds of His mantle, the soul of
Mary in the form of a little child, and at the same time blesses the body
which is carried away by angels — The Resurrection of Mary.

Below the lintel, supporting it, and dividing the doorway in halves,
is the trumeau, — the central pier, — a new part of the portal which
was unknown to the western door. Usually in the Virgin's churches,
as at Rheims, or Amiens or Paris, the Virgin herself, with her Son in
her arms, stands against this pier, trampling on the dragon with the
woman's head. Here, not the Virgin with the Christ, but her mother
Saint Anne stands, with the infant Virgin in her arms; while beneath
is, or was. Saint Joachim, her husband, among his flocks, receiving from
the Archangel Gabriel the annunciation.

So jit the entrance the Virgin declares herself divinely Queen in
■herown right; divinely bom; divinely resurrected from death, on the
third day; seated by divine right on the throne of Heaven, at the right
hand of God, the Son, with Whom she is one.

Unless we feel this assertion of divine right in the Queen of Heaven,
apart from the Trinity, yet one with It, Chartres is unintelligible. The
extreme emphasis laid upon it at the church door shows what the
church means within. Of course, the assertion was not strictly ortho-
dox; perhaps, since we are not members of the Church, we might be
unnoticed and unrebuked if we start by suspecting that the worship
of the Virgin never was strictly orthodox; but Chartres was hers
.before it ever belonged to the Church, and, like Lourdes in our own

8o MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

time, was a shrine peculiarly favoured by her presence. The mere
fact that it was a bishopric had little share in its sanctity. The bishop
was much more afraid of Mary than he was of any Church Council
ever held.

Critics are doing their best to destroy the peculiar personal interest
of this porch, but tourists and pilgrims may be excused for insisting
on their traditional rights here, since the porch is singular, even in the
thirteenth century, for belonging entirely to them and the royal fam-
ily of France, subject only to the Virgin. True artists, turned critics,
think also less of rules than of values, and no ignorant public can be
trusted to join the critics in losing temper judiciously over the date
or correctness of a portrait until they knew something of its motives and
merits. The public has always felt certain that some of the statues which
stand against the outer piers of this porch are portraits, and t^ey see
no force in the objection that such decoration was not customary in
the Church. Many things at Chartres were not customary in the Church ,
although the Church now prefers not to dwell on them. Therefore
the student returns to VioUet-le-Duc with his usual delight at finding
at least one critic whose sense of values is stronger than his sense of
rule: "Each statue," he says in his "Dictionar>'" (iii, i66), "possesses
its personal character which remains graven on the memory like the
recollection of a living being whom one has known. ... A large part
of the statues in the porches of Notre Dame de Chartres, as well as
of the portals of the Cathedrals of Amiens and Rheims, possess these
individual qualities, and this it is which explains why these statues
produce on the crowd so vivid an impression that it names them,
knows them, and attaches to each of them an idea, often a legend."

Probably the crowd did so from the first moment they saw the
statues, and with good reason. At all events, they have attached to
two of the most individual figures on the north porch, two names,
perhaps the best known in France in the year 1226, but which since
the year 1300 can have conveyed only the most shadowy meaning to

TOWERS AND PORTALS 8i

any but pure antiquarians. The group is so beautiful as to be given
a plate to itself in the "Monographic" (number 26), as representing
Philip Hurepel and his wife Mahaut de Boulogne. So little could any
crowd, or even any antiquarian, at any time within six hundred years
have been likely to pitch on just these persons to associate with
Blanche of Castile in any kind of family unity, that the mere sugges-
tion seems wild; yet Blanche outlived Pierre by nearly twenty years,
and her power over this transept and porch ended only with her death
as regent in 1252.

Philippe, nicknamed Hurepel, — Boarskin, — was a " fils de France,"
whose father, Philip Augustus, had serious, not to say fatal, difficul-
ties with the Church about the legality of his marriage, and was forced
to abandon his wife, who died in 1201, after giving birth to Hurepel
in 1200. The child was recognized as legitimate, and stood next to
the throne, after his half-brother Louis, who was thirteen years older.
Almost at his birth he was affianced to Mahaut, Countess of Boulogne,
and the marriage was celebrated in 1216. Rich and strongly connected,
Hurepel naturally thought himself — and was — head of the royal
family next to the King, and when his half-brother, Louis VHL died
in 1226, leaving only a son, afterwards Saint Louis, a ten-year-old
boy, to succeed, Hurepel very properly claimed the guardianship of
his infant nephew, and deeply resented being excluded by Queen
Blanche from what he regarded — perhaps with justice — as his right.
Nearly all the great lords and the members of the royal family sided
with him, and entered into a civil war against Blanche, at the moment
when these two porches of Chartres were building, between 1228 and
1230. The two greatest leaders of the conspiracy were Hurepel, whom
ye are expected to recognize on the pier of this porch, and Pierre
Mauclerc, of Brittany and Dreux, whom we have no choice but to
admit on the trumeau of the other. In those days every great feudal
lord was more or less related by blood to the Crown, and although
Blanche of Castile was also a cousin as well as queen-mother, they

82 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

hated her as a Spanish intruder with such hatred as men felt in an age
when passions were real.

That these two men should be found here, associated with Blanche
in the same work, at the same time, under the same roof, is a fantastic
idea, and students can feel in this political difficulty a much stronger
objection to admitting Hurepel to Queen Blanche's porch than any
supposed rule of Church custom; yet the first privilege of tourist ig-
norance is the right to see, or try to see, their thirteenth century with
thirteenth-century eyes. Passing by the statues of Philip and Mahaut,
and stepping inside the church door, almost the first figure that the
visitor sees on lifting his eyes to the upper windows of the transept is
another figure of Philippe Hurepel, in glass, on his knees, with clasped
hands, before an altar ; and to prevent possibility of mistake his blazoned
coat bears the words: " Phi: Conte de Bolone." Apparently he is the
donor, for, in the rose above, he sits in arms on a white horse with a
shield bearing the blazon of France. Obliged to make his peace with
the Queen in 1230, Hurepel died in 1233 or 1234, while Blanche was
still regent, and instantly took his place as of right side by side with
Blanche's castles of Castile among the great benefactors of the church.

Beneath the next rose is Mahaut herself, as donor, bearing her
husband's armsof France, suggesting that the windows must have been
given together, probably before Philip's death in 1233, since Mahaut
was married again in 1238, this time to Alfonso of Portugal, who re-
pudiated her in 1249, and left her to die in her own town of Boulogne
in 1258. Lastly, in the third window of the series, is her daughter
Jeanne, — "lehenne," — who was probably born before 1220, and
who was married in 1236 to Gaucher de Chatillon, one of the greatest
warriors of his time. Jeanne also — according to the Abbe Bulteau
(in, 225) — bears the armsof her father and mother; which seems to
suggest that she gave this window before her marriage. These three
windows, therefore, have the air of dating at least as early as 1233
when Philip Hurepel died, while next them follow two more roses, and

TOWERS AND PORTALS 83

the great rose of France, presumably of the same date, all scattered
over with the castles of Queen Blanche. The motive of the porch outside
is repeated in the glass, as it should be, and as the Saint Anne of the Rose
of France, within, repeats the Saint Anne on the trumeau of the portal.
iThe personal stamp of the royal family is intense, but the stamp of the
Virgin's personality is intenser still. In the presence of Mary, not only
did princes hide their quarrels, but they also put on their most courte-
ous manners and the most refined and even austere address. The
Byzantine display of luxury and adornment had vanished. All the
figures suggest the sanctity of the King and his sister Isabel ; the court
has the air of a convent; but the idea of Mary's majesty is asserted
through it all. The artists and donors and priests forgot nothing which,
in their judgment, could set off the authority, elegance, and refinement
of the Queen of Heaven; even the young ladies-in-waiting are there,
figured by the twelve Virtues and the fourteen Beatitudes; and, in-
deed, though men are plenty and some of them are handsome, women
give the tone, the charm, and mostly the intelligence. The Court of
Mary is feminine, and its charms are Grace and Love; perhaps even
more grace than love, in a social sense, if you look at Beauty and
Friendship among Beatitudes.

M. Huysmans insists that this sculpture is poor in comparison with
his twelfth-century Prodigal Daughter, and I hope you can enter into
the spirit of his enthusiasm; but other people prefer the thirteenth-
century work, and think it equals the best Greek. Approaching, or
surpassing this, — as you like, — is the sculpture you will see at Rheims,
of the same period, and perhaps the same hands; but, for our purpose,
the Queen of Sheba, here in the right-hand bay, is enough, because you
can compare it on the spot with M. Huysmans's figure on the western
portal, which may also be a Queen of Sheba, who, as spouse of Solomon,
typified the Church, and therefore prefigured Mary herself. Both are
types of Court beauty and grace, one from the twelfth century, the
other from the thirteenth, and you can prefer which you please; but

84 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

you want to bear in mind that each, in her time, pleased the Virgin.
You can even take for a settled fact that these were the types of femi-
nine beauty and grace which pleased the Virgin beyond all others.

The purity of taste, feeling, and manners which stamps the art of
these centuries, as it did the Court of Saint Louis and his mother, is
something you will not wholly appreciate till you reach the depravity
of the Valois; but still you can see how exquisite the Virgin's taste was,
and how pure. You can also see how she shrank from the sight of pain.
Here, in the central bay, next to King David, who stands at her right
hand, is the great figure of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac. If there
is one subject more revolting than another to a woman who typifies the
Mother, it is this subject of Abraham and Isaac, with its compound
horror of masculine stupidity and brutality. The sculptor has tried to
make even this motive a pleasing one. He has placed Abraham against
the column in the correct harshness of attitude, with his face turned
aside and up, listening for his orders; but the little Isaac, with hands
and feet tied, leans like a bundle of sticks against his father's knee
with an expression of perfect faith and confidence, while Abraham's
left hand quiets him and caresses the boy's face, with a movement
that must have gone straight to Mary's heart, for Isaac always pre-
figured Christ.

The glory of Mary was not one of terror, and her porch contains
no appeal to any emotion but those of her perfect grace. If we were
to stay here for weeks, we should find only this idea worked into every
detail. The Virgin of the thirteenth century is no longer an Empress;
she is Queen Mother, — an idealized Blanche of Castile; — too high
to want, or suffer, or to revenge, or to aspire, but not too high to pity,
to punish, or to pardon. The women went to her porch for help as
naturally as babies to their mother; and the men, in her presence, fell
on their knees because they feared her intelligence and her anger.

Not that all the men showed equal docility! We must go next,
round the church, to the south porch, which was the gift of Pierre

TOWERS AND PORTALS 85

Mauclerc, Comte de Dreux, another member of the royal family, great-
grandson of Louis VI, and therefore second cousin to Louis VIII and
Philip Hurepel. Philip Augustus, his father's first cousin, married the
young man, in 12 12, to Alix, heiress of the Duchy of Brittany, and this
marriage made him one of the most powerful vassals of the Crown.
He joined Philip Hurepel in resisting the regency of Queen Blanche
in 1227, and Blanche, after a long struggle, caused him to be deposed
in 1230. Pierre was obliged to submit, and was pardoned. Until 1236,
he remained in control of the Duchy of Brittany, but then was obliged
to surrender his power to his son, and turned his turbulent activity
against the infidels in Syria and Egypt, dying in 1250, on his return
from Saint Louis's disastrous crusade. Pierre de Dreux was a mascu-
line character, — a bad cleric, as his nickname Mauclerc testified, but
a gentleman, a soldier, and a scholar, and, what is more to our purpose,
a man of taste. He built the south porch at Chartres, apparently as a
memorial of his marriage with Alix in 12 12, and the statuary is of the
same date with that of the north porch, but, like_that^ it_w^s..not fin-,
ished when Pierre died in 1250.

One would like to know whether Pierre preferred to take the
southern entrance, or whether he was driven there by the royal claim
to the Virgin's favour. The southern porch belongs to the Son, as the
northern belongs to the Mother. Pierre never showed much defer-
ence to women, and probably felt more at his ease under the protec-
tion of the Son than of Mary; but in any case he showed as clearly as
possible what he thought on this question of persons. To Pierre, Christ
was first, and he asserted his opinion as emphatically as Blanche as-
serted hers.

Which porch is the more beautiful is a question for artists to discuss
and decide, if they can. Either is good enough for us, whose pose is
ignorance, and whose pose is strictly correct; but apart from its beauty
or its art, there is also the question of feeling, of motive, which puts the
Forche de Dreux in contrast with the Porche de France, and this is

86 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

wholly within our competence. At the outset, the central bay displays,
above the doorway, Christ, on a throne, raising His hands to show the
stigmata, the wounds which were the proof of man's salvation. At His
right hand sits the Mother, — without her crown; on His left, in equal
rank with the Mother, sits Saint John the Evangelist. Both are in the
same attitude of supplication as intercessors; there is no distinction
in rank or power between Mary and John, since neither has any power
except what Christ gives them. Pierre did not, indeed, put the Mother
on her knees before the Son, as you can see her at Amiens and in later
churches, — certainly bad taste in Mary's own palace; but he al-
lowed her no distinction which is not her strict right. The angels above
and around bear the symbols of the Passion; they are unconscious of
Mary's presence; they are absorbed in the perfections of the Son. On
the lintel just below is the Last Judgment, where Saint Michael re-
appears, weighing the souls of the dead which Mary and John above
are trying to save from the strict justice of Christ. The whole melo-
drama of Church terrors appears after the manner of the thirteenth
century, on this church door, without regard to Mary's feelings; and
below, against the trumeau, stands the great figure of Christ, — the
whole Church, -^ trampling on the lion and dragon. On either side
of the doorway stand six great figures of the Apostles asserting them-
selves as the columns of the Church, and looking down at us with an
expression no longer calculated to calm our fears or encourage extrav-
agant hopes. No figure on this porch suggests a portrait or recalls,,,
a memory.

Very grand, indeed, is this doorway; dignified, impressive, and
masculine to a degree seldom if ever equalled in art; and the left bay_^
rivals it. There, in the tympanum, Christ appears again; standing;
bearing on His head the crown royal ; alone, except for the two angels
who adore, and surrounded only by the martyrs, His witnesses. The
right bay is devoted to Saint Nicholas and the Saints Confessors who
bear witness to the authority of Christ in faith. Of the twenty-eight

X
H

u
a;

TOWERS AND PORTALS 87

great figures, the officers of the royal court, Wfho make thus the strength
of_th6_Church beneath Christ, not one is a woman. The masculine
orthodoxy of Pierre Mauclerc has spared neither sex nor youth ; all are
of a maturity which chills the blood, excepting two, whose youthful
beauty is heightened by the severity of their surroundings, so that the
Abb6 Bulteau makes bold even to say that "the two statues of Saint
George and of Saint Theodore may be regarded as the most beautiful
of our cathedral, perhaps even as the two masterpieces of statuary at
the end of the thirteenth century." On that point, let every one follow
his taste; but one reflection at least seems to force itself on the mind in
comparing these twenty-eight figures. Certainly the sword, however
it may compare with the pen in other directions, is in art more power-
ful than all the pens, or volumes, or crosiers ever made. Your " Golden
Legend" and Roman Breviary are here the only guide-books worth
consulting, and the stories of young George and Theodore stand there
recorded; as their miracle under the walls of Antioch, during the first
crusade, is matter of history ; but among these magnificent figures one
detects at a glance that it is not the religion or sacred purity of the sub-
ject, or even the miracles or the suflFerings, which inspire passion for
Saint George and Saint Theodore, under the Abba's robe; it is with
him, as with the plain boy and girl, simply youth, with lance and
sword and shield.

These two figures stand in the outer embrasures of the left bay,
where they can be best admired, and perhaps this arrangement shows
what Perron de Dreux, as he was commonly called, loved most, in his
heart of hearts; but elsewhere, even in this porch, he relaxed his
severity, and became at times almost gracious to women. Good judges
have, indeed, preferred this porch to the northern one; but, be that
as you please, it contains seven hundred and eighty-three figures,
large and small, to serve for comparison. Among these, the female
element has its share, though not a conspicuous one; and even the
Virgin gets her rights, though not beside her Son. To see her, you

88 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

must stand outside in the square and, with a glass, look at the central
pignon, or gable, of the porch. There, just above the point of the arch,
you will see Mary on her throne, crowned, wearing her royal robes,
and holding the Child on her knees, with the two archangels on either
side offering incense. Pierre de Dreux, or some one else, admitted at
last that she was Queen Regent, although evidently not eager to do
so; and if you turn your glass up to the gable of the transept itself,
above the great rose and the colonnade over it, you can see another and
a colossal statue of the Virgin, but standing, with the Child on her
left arm. She seems to be crowned, and to hold the globe in her right
hand ; but the Abbe Bulteau says it is a flower. The two archangels are
still there. This figure is thought to have been a part of the finishing
decoration added by Philip the Fair in 1304.

In theology, Pierre de Dreux seems to show himself a more learned
clerk than his cousins of France, and, as an expression of the meaning
the church of Mary should externally display, the Porche de Dreux, if
not as personal, is as energetic as the Porche de France, or the western
portal. As we pass into the Cathedral, under the great Christ, on the
trumeau, you must stop to look at Pierre himself. A bridegroom,
crowned with flowers on his wedding-day, he kneels in prayer, while
two servants distribute bread to the poor. Below, you see him again,
seated with his wife Alix before a table with one loaf, assisting at the
meal they give to the poor. Pierre kneels to God; he and his wife
bow before the Virgin and the poor; — but not to Queen Blanche!

Now let us enter! —

CHAPTER VI

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES

WE must take ten minutes to accustom our eyes to the light, and
we had better use them to seek the reason why we come to
Chartres rather than to Rheims or Amiens or Bourges, for the cathe-
dral that fills our ideal. The truth is, there are several reasons; there
generally are, for doing the things we like; and after you have studied
Chartres to the ground, and got your reasons settled, you will never
find an antiquarian to agree with you; the architects will probably
listen to you with contempt; and even these excellent priests, whose
kindness is great, whose patience is heavenly, and whose good opinion
you would so gladly gain, will turn from you with pain, if not with
horror. The Gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the
Renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Ro-
man, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every
chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern,
when we come close to them ; but the Gothic gets away. No two men
think alike about it, and no woman agrees with either man. The Church
itself never agreed about it, and the architects agree even less than the
priests. To most minds it casts too many shadows; it wraps itself in
mystery; and when people talk of mystery, they commonly mean
fear. To others, the Gothic seems hoary with age and decrepitude,
and its shadows mean death. What is curious to watch is the fanatical
conviction of the Gothic enthusiast, to whom the twelfth century means
exuberant youth, the eternal child of Wordsworth, over whom its
immortality broods like the day ; it is so simple and yet so complicated ;
it sees so much and so little; it loves so many toys and cares for so few
necessities; its youth is so young, its age so old, and its youthful

90 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

yearning for old thought is so disconcerting, like the mysterioua
senility of the baby that —

Deaf and silent, reads the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind.

One need not take it more seriously than one takes the baby itself.
Our amusement is to play with it, and to catch its meaning in its
smile; and whatever Chartres maybe now, when young it was a smile.
To the Church, no doubt, its cathedral here has a fixed and adminis-
trative meaning, which is the same as that of every other bishop's
seat and with which we have nothing whatever to do. To us, it is a
child's fancy; a toy-house to please the Queen of Heaven, — to please
her so much that she would be happy in it, — to charm her till she
smiled.
>fc^ The Queen Mother was as majestic as you like; she was absolute;
she could be stern; she was not above being angry; but she was still
a woman, who loved grace, beauty, ornament, — her toilette, robes,
jewels; — who considered the arrangements of her palace with atten-
tion, and liked both light and colour; who kept a keen eye on her
Court, and exacted prompt and willing obedience from king and arch-
bishops as well as from beggars and drunken priests. She protected
her friends and punished her enemies. She required space, beyond
what was known in the Courts of kings, because she was liable at all
times to have ten thousand people begging her for favours — mostly
inconsistent with law — and deaf to refusal. She was extremely
sensitive to neglect, to disagreeable impressions, to want of intelligence
in her surroundings. She was the greatest artist, as she was the great-
est philosopher and musician and theologist, that ever lived on earth,
except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an Infant under her guardian-
ship. Her taste was infallible ; her sentence eternally final. This church
was built for her in this spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian
faith, — in this singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a
doll-house for her favourite blonde doll. Unless you can go back to

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES 91

your dolls, you are out of place here. If you can go back to them,
and get rid for one small hour of the weight of custom, you shall see
Chartres in glory.

The palaces of earthly queens were hovels compared with these
palaces of the Queen of Heaven at Chartres, Paris, Laon, Noyon,
Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux, Coutances, — a list that might be
stretched into a volume. The nearest approach we have made to a
palace was the Merveille at Mont-Saint-Michel, but no Queen had a
palace equal to that. The Merveille was built, or designed, about the
year 1200; toward the year 1500, Louis XI built a great castle at Loches
in Touraine, and there Queen Anne de Bretagne had apartments which
still exist, and which we will visit. At Blois you shall see the residence
which served for Catherine de Medicis till her death in 1589. Anne de
Bretagne was trebly queen, and Catherine de Medicis took her stand-
ard of comfort from the luxury of Florence. At Versailles you can see
the apartments which the queens of the Bourbon line occupied through
their century of magnificence. All put together, and then trebled in
importance, could not rival the splendour of any single cathedral
dedicated to Queen Mary in the thirteenth century; and of them all,
Chartres was built to be peculiarly and exceptionally her delight.

One has grown so used to this sort of loose comparison, this reckless
waste of words, that one no longer adopts an idea unless it is driven
in with hammers of statistics and columns of figures. With the irri-
tating demand for literal exactness and perfectly straight lines which
lights up every truly American eye, you will certainly ask when this
exaltation of Mary began, and unless you get the dates, you will doubt
the facts. It is your own fault if they are tiresome; you might easily
read them all in the " Iconographie de la Sainte Vierge," by M. Ro-
hault de Fleury, published in 1878. You can start at Byzantium with
the Empress Helena in 326, or with the Council of Ephesus in 431.
You will find the Virgin acting as the patron saint of Constantinople
and of the Imperial residence, under as many names as Artemis 01

92 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Aphrodite had borne. As Godmother (0eo/iijT7?p), Deipara (QeoroKoi),
Pathfinder ('OBrjyrjrpia), she was the chief favourite of the Eastern
Empire, and her picture was carried at the head of every procession
and hung on the wall of every hut and hovel, as it is still wherever
the Greek Church goes. In the year 6io, when Heraclius sailed from
Carthage to dethrone Phocas at Constantinople, his ships carried the
image of the Virgin at their mastheads. In 1 143, just before the fl^che
on the Chartres clocher was begun, the Basileus John Comnenus died,
and so devoted was he to the Virgin that, on a triumphal entry into
Constantinople, he put the image of the Mother of God in his chariot,
while he himself walked. In the Western Church the Virgin had al-
ways been highly honoured, but it was not until the crusades that she
began to overshadow the Trinity itself. Then her miracles became
more frequent and her shrines more frequented, so that Chartres,
soon after lioo, was rich enough to build its western portal with By-
zantine splendour. A proof of the new outburst can be read in the
story of Citeaux. For us, Citeaux means Saint Bernard, who joined
the Order in 11 12, and in 11 15 founded his Abbey of Clairvaux in the
territory of Troyes. In him, the religious emotion of the half-century
between the first and second crusades (1095-1 145) centred as in no one
else. He was a French precursor of Saint Francis of Assisi who lived
a century later. If we were to plunge into the story of Citeaux and
Saint Bernard we should never escape, for Saint Bernard incarnates
what we are trying to understand, and his mind is further from us
than the architecture. You would lose hold of everything actual, if
you could comprehend in its contradictions the strange mixture of
passion and caution, the austerity, the self-abandonment, the vehe-
mence, the restraint, the love, the hate, the miracles, and the scepti-
cism of Saint Bernard. The Cistercian Order, which was founded in
1098, from the first put all its churches under the special protection
of the Virgin, and Saint Bernard in his time was regarded as the apple
of the Virgin's eye. Tradition as old as the twelfth century, which long

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES 93

afterwards gave to Murillo the subject of a famous painting, told that
once, when he was reciting before her statue the "Ave Maris Stella,"
and came to the words, " Monstra te esse Matrem," the image, press-
ing its breast, dropped on the lips of her servant three drops of the
milk which had nourished the Saviour. The same miracle, in various
forms, was told of many other persons, both saints and sinners; but it
made so much impression on the mind of the age that, in the four-
teenth century, Dante, seeking in Paradise for some official introduc-
tion to the foot of the Throne, found no intercessor with the Queen of
Heaven more potent than Saint Bernard. You can still read Bernard's
hymns to the Virgin, and even his sermons, if you like. To him she was
the great mediator. In the eyes of a culpable humanity, Christ was
too sublime, too terrible, too just, but not even the weakest human
frailty could fear to approach his Mother. Her attribute was humility;
her love and pity were infinite. "Let him deny your mercy who can
say that he has ever asked it in vain."

Saint Bernard was emotional and to a certain degree mystical, like
Adam de Saint- Victor, whose hymns were equally famous, but the
emotional saints and mystical poets were not by any means allowed to
establish exclusive rights to the Virgin's favour. Abelard was as de-
voted as they were, and wrote hymns as well. Philosophy claimed her,
and Albert the Great, the head of scholasticism, the teacher of Thomas
Aquinas, decided in her favour the question: "Whether the Blessed
Virgin possessed perfectly the seven liberal arts." The Church at
Chartres had decided it a hundred years before by putting the seven
liberal arts next her throne, with Aristotle himself to witness; but
Albertus gave the reason: " I hold that she did, for it is written, 'Wis-
dom has built herself a house, and has sculptured seven columns,*
That house is the blessed Virgin; the seven columns are the seven
liberal arts. Mary, therefore, had perfect mastery of science." Natur-
ally she had also perfect mastery of economics, and most of her great
churches were built in economic centres. The guilds were, if possible,

94 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

more devoted to her than the monks ; the bourgeoisie of Paris, Rouen,
Amiens, Laon, spend money by millions to gain her favour. Most sur-
prising of all, the great military class was perhaps the most vociferous.
Of all inappropriate haunts for the gentle, courteous, pitying Mary, a
field of battle seems to be the worst, if not distinctly blasphemous; yet
the greatest French warriors insisted on her leading them into battle,
and in the actual m81te when men were killing each other, on every
battle-field in Europe, for at least five hundred years, Mary was pres-
ent, leading both sides. The battle-cry of the famous Constable du
Guesclin was " Notre-Dame-Guesclin " ; "Notre-Dame-Coucy" was
the cry of the great Sires de Coucy ; " Notre-Dame-Auxerre " ; " Notre-
Dame-Sancerre " ; Notre-Dame-Hainault"; Notre-Dame-Gueldres";
"Notre-Dame-Bourbon"; " Notre-Dame-Bearn " ; — all well-known
battle-cries. The King's own battle at one time cried, " Notre-Dame-
Saint-Denis-Montjoie" ; the Dukes of Burgundy cried, " Notre- Dame-
Bourgogne " ; and even the soldiers of the Pope were said to cry, " Notre-
Dame-Saint- Pierre."

The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American
mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the
money it cost. According to statistics, in the single century between
1 1 70 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five
hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost, ac-
cording to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand millions
to replace. Five thousand million francs is a thousand million dollars,
and this covered only the great churches of a single century. The same
scale of expenditure had been going on since the year looo, and almost
every parish in France had rebuilt its church in stone; to this day
France is strewn with the ruins of this architecture, and yet the
still preserved churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, among
the churches that belong to the Romanesque and Transition period,
are numbered by hundreds until they reach well into the thousands.
The share of this capital which was — if one may use a commerciaJ

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES 95

figure — invested in the Virgin cannot be fixed, any more than the
total sum given to religious objects between looo and 1300; but in a
spiritual and artistic sense, it was almost the whole, and expressed an
intensity of conviction never again reached by any passion, whether
of religion, of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps never even
parallelled by any single economic effort, except in war. Nearly every
great church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries belonged to Mary,
until in France one asks for the church of Notre Dame as though it
meant cathedral ; but, not satisfied with this, she contracted the habit
of requiring in all churches a chapel of her own, called in English the
"Lady Chapel," which was apt to be as large as the church but was
always meant to be handsomer; and there, behind the high altar, in
her own private apartment, Mary sat, receiving her innumerable sup-
pliants, and ready at any moment to step up upon the high altar itself
to support the tottering authority of the local saint.

Expenditure like this rests invariably on an economic idea. Just as
the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in
a railway system in the belief that they would make money by it in
this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of
Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest
in the life to come. The investment was based on the power of Mary
as Queen rather than on any orthodox Church conception of the Vir-
gin's legitimate station. Papal Rome never greatly loved Byzantine
empresses or French queens. The Virgin of Chartres was never wholly
sympathetic to the Roman Curia. To this day the Church writers —
like the Abbe Bulteau or M. Rohault de Fleury — are singularly shy
of the true Virgin of majesty, whether at Chartres or at Byzantium
or wherever she is seen. The fathers Martin and Cahier at Bourges
alone felt her true value. Had the Church controlled her, the Virgin
would perhaps have remained prostrate at the foot of the Cross.
Dragged by a Byzantine Court, backed by popular insistence and im-
pelled by overpowering self-interest, the Church accepted the Virgin

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

throned and crowned, seated by Christ, the Judge throned and
crowned; but even this did not wholly satisfy the French of the thir-
teenth century who seemed bent on absorbing Christ in His Mother,
and making the Mother the Church, and Christ the Symbol.

The Church had crowned and enthroned her almost from the
beginning, and could not have dethroned her if it would. In all Chris-
tian art — sculpture or mosaic, painting or poetry — the Virgin's
rank was expressly asserted. Saint Bernard, like John Comnenus, and
probably at the same time (1120-40), chanted hymns to the Virgin
as Queen : —

O salutaris Virgo Stella Maris O saviour Virgin, Star of Sea,

Generans prolem, ^I^quitatis solem, \\Tio bore for child the Son of Justice,

Lucis auctorem, Retinens pudorem. The source of Light, Virgin always
Suscipe laudem! Hear our praise!

CeU Regina Per quam medicina
Datur segrotis, Gratia devotis,
Gaudium moestis, Mundo lux ccElestis,
Spesque salutb;

Aula regalis, Virgo specialis,
Posce medelam Nobis et tutelam,
Suscipe vota, Precibusque cuncta
Pelle molesta!

Queen of Heaven who have given
Medicine to the sick, Grace to the devout,
Joy to the sad. Heaven's light to the world
And hope of salvation;

Court royal. Virgin typical,
Grant us cure and guard.
Accept our vows, and by prayers
Drive all griefs away!

As the lyrical poet of the twelfth century, Adam de Saint- Victor
seems to have held rank higher if possible than that of Saint Bernard,
and his hymns on the Virgin are certainly quite as emphatic an as-
sertion of her majesty: —

Imperatrix supemorumi
Superatrix infemorumi
Eligenda via cceli,
Retinenda spe fideli,
Separatos a te longe
Revocatos ad te junge
Tuorum collegio!

Empress of the highest.
Mistress over the lowest.
Chosen path of Heaven,
Held fast by faithful hope,
Those separated from you far.
Recalled to you, unite
In your fold!

To delight in the childish jingle of the mediaeval Latin is a sign
of a futile mind, no doubt, and I beg pardon of you and of the Church
for wasting your precious summer day on poetry which was regarded

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES

as mystical in its age and which now sounds like a nursery rhyme; but a
verse or two of Adam's hymn on the Assumption of the Virgin com-
pletes the record of her rank, and goes to complete also the documen-
tary proof of her majesty at Chartres: —

Salve, Mater Salvatorisl
Vas electum! Vas honoris!

V'as ccelestis Gratiae!
Ab aeterno Vas provisum!
Vas insigne! Vas excisum

Manu sapientiael

Salve, Mater pietatis,
Et totius Trinitatis

Nobile Triclinium 1
Verbi tamen incarnati
Speciale majestati

Praeparans bospitium!

0 Maria! Stella maris!
Dignitate singularis,
Super omnes ordinaris

Ordines coelestium!
In supremo sita poli
Nos commenda tuas proli,
Ne terrores sive doli

Nos supplantent hostium!

Mother of our Saviour, hail!
Chosen vessel ! Sacred Grail 1

Font of celestial grace!
From eternity forethought!
By the hand of Wisdom wTought!

Precious, faultless Vase!

Hail, Mother of Divinity!
Hail, Temple of the Trinity!

Home of the Triune God !
In whom the Incarnate Word had birth,
The King! to whom you gave on earth

Imperial abode.

Oh, Maria! ConsteDationl
Inspiration! Elevation!
Rule and Law and Ordination

Of the angels' host!
Highest height of God's Creation,
Pray your Son's commiseration,
Lest, by fear or fraud, salvation

For our souls be lost !

Constantly — one might better say at once, officially, she was ad-
dressed in these terms of supreme majesty: " ImperatrLx supernorum! "
"Cceli Regina!" "Aula regalis! " but the twelfth century seemed deter-
mined to carry the idea out to its logical conclusion in defiance of dogma.
Not only was the Son absorbed in the Mother, or represented as under
her guardianship, but the Father fared no better, and the Holy Ghost
followed. The poets regarded the Virgin as the "Templum Trinita-
tis" ; " totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium." She was the refectory of the
Trinity — the "Triclinium" — because the refectory was the largest
room and contained the whole of the members, and was divided in
three parts by two rows of columns. She was the "Templum Trinitatis,"
the Church itself, with its triple aisle. The Trinity was absorbed in her.

98 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

This is a delicate subject in the Church, and you must feel it with
delicacy, without brutally insisting on its necessary contradictions.
All theology and all philosophy are full of contradictions quite as
flagrant and far less sympathetic. This particular variety of religious
faith is simply human, and has made its appearance in one form or
another in nearly all religions; but though the twelfth century carried
it to an extreme, and at Chartres you see it in its most charming ex-
pression, we have got always to make allowances for what was going
on beneath the surface in men's minds, consciously or unconsciously,
and for the latent scepticism which lurks behind all faith. The Church
itself never quite accepted the full claims of what was called Mariola-
try. One may be sure, too, that the bourgeois capitalist and the stu-
dent of the schools, each from his own point of view, watched the Vir-
gin with anxious interest. The bourgeois had put an enormous share of
his capital into what was in fact an economical speculation, not unlike
the South Sea Scheme, or the railway system of our own time ; except
that in one case the energy was devoted to shortening the road to
Heaven; in the other, to shortening the road to Paris; but no serious
schoolman could have felt entirely convinced that God would enter
into a business partnership with man, to establish a sort of joint-stock
society for altering the operation of divine and universal laws. The
bourgeois cared little for the philosophical doubt if the economical-
result proved to be good, but he watched this result with his usual
practical sagacity, and required an experience of only about three
generations (1200-1300) to satisfy himself that relics were not certain
in their effects; that the Saints were not always able or willing to
help; that Mary herself could not certainly be bought or bribed; that
prayer without money seemed to be quite as efficacious as prayer with
money; and that neither the road to Heaven nor Heaven itself had
been made surer or brought nearer by an investmet.t of capital which
amounted to the best part of the wealth of France. Economically
speaking, he became satisfied that his enormous money-investment

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES 99

had proved to be an almost total loss, and the reaction on his mind
was as violent as the emotion. For three hundred years it prostrated
France. The efforts of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry to recover
their property, so far as it was recoverable, have lasted to the present
day and we had best take care not to get mixed in those passions.

If you are to get the full enjoyment of Chartres, you must, for the
time, believe in Mary as Bernard and Adam did, and feel her presence
as the architects did, in every stone they placed, and every touch they
chiselled. You must try first to rid your mind of the traditional idea
that the Gothic is an intentional expression of religious gloom. The
necessity for light was the motive of the Gothic architects. They needed
light and always more light, until they sacrificed safety and common
sense in trying to get it. They converted their walls into windows,
raised their vaults, diminished their piers, until their churches could no
longer stand. You will see the limits at Beauvais; at Chartres we have
not got so far, but even here, in places where the Virgin wanted it, —
as above the high altar, — the architect has taken all the light there
was to take. For the same reason, fenestration became the most im-
portant part of the Gothic architect's work, and at Chartres was un-
commonly interesting because the architect was obliged to design a
new system, which should at the same time satisfy the laws of con-
struction and the taste and imagination of Mary. No doubt the first )/
command of the Queen of Heaven was for light, but the second, at
least equally imperative, was for colour. Any earthly queen, even
though she were not Byzantine in taste, loved colour; and the truest
of queens — the only true Queen of Queens — had richer and finer
taste in colour than the queens of fifty earthly kingdoms, as you will
see when we come to the immense effort to gratify her in the glass of
her windows. Illusion for illusion, — granting for the moment that
Mary was an illusion, — the Virgin Mother in this instance repaid
to her worshippers a larger return for their money than the capitalist
has ever been able to get, at least in this world, from any other illu-

100 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

sion of wealth which he has tried to make a source of pleasure and
profit.

The next point on which Mary evidently insisted was the arrange-
ment for her private apartments, the apse, as distinguished from her
throne-room, the choir; both being quite distinct from the hall, or
reception-room of the public, which was the nave with its enlargements
in the transepts. This arrangement marks the distinction between
churches built as shrines for the deity and churches built as halls of
worship for the public. The difference is chiefly in the apse, and the
apse of Chartres is the most interesting of all apses from this point of
view.
_;zC The Virgin required chiefly these three things, or, if you like,
these four: space, light, convenience; and colour decoration to unite
and harmonize the whole. This concerns the interior ; on the exterior
she required statuary, and the only complete system of decorative
sculpture that existed seems to belong to her churches: — Paris,
Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres. Mary required all this magnificence
at Chartres for herself alone, not for the public. As far as one can see
into the spirit of the builders, Chartres was exclusively intended for
the Virgin, as the Temple of Abydos was intended for Osiris. The wants
of man, beyond a mere roof-cover, and perhaps space to some degree,
enter to no very great extent into the problem of Chartres. Man came
to render homage or to ask favours. The Queen received him in her pal-
ace, where she alone was at home, and alone gave commands.

The artist's second thought was to exclude from his work every-
T thing that could displease Mary; and since Mary differed from living
queens only in infinitely greater majesty and refinement, the artist
could admit only what pleased the actual taste of the great ladies who
dictated taste at the Courts of France and England, which surrounded
the little Court of the Counts of Chartres. What they were — these
women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — we shall have to see
or seek in other directions; but Chartres is perhaps the most magni-

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES lOI

ticent and permanent monument they left of their taste, and we can
begin here with learning certain things which they were not.

In the first place, they were not in the least vague, dreamy, or
mystical in a modern sense; — far from it! They seemed anxious only
to throw the mysteries into a blaze of light; not so much physical,
perhaps, — since they, like all women, liked moderate shadow for their
toilettes, — but luminous in the sense of faith. There is nothing about
Chartres that you would think mystical, who know your Lohengrin,
Siegfried, and Parsifal. If you care to make a study of the whole liter-
ature of the subject, read M. Mile's "Art Religieux du XIIP Si^cle en
France," and use it for a guide-book. Here you need only note how
symbolic and how simple the sculpture is, on the portals and porches.
Even what seems a grotesque or an abstract idea is no more than the
simplest child's personification. On the walls you may have noticed
the Ane qui vielle, — the ass playing the lyre; and on all the old churches
you can see "bestiaries," as they were called, of fabulous animals,
symbolic or not; but the symbolism is as simple as the realism of the
oxen at Laon. It gave play to the artist in his effort for variety of dec-
oration, and it amused the people, — probably the Virgin also was not
above-being amused; — now and then it seems about to suggest what
you would call an esoteric meaning, that is to say, a meaning which each
one of us can consider private property reserved for our own amuse-
ment, and from which the public is excluded; yet, in truth, in the Vir-
gin's churches the public is never excluded, but invited. The Virgin
even had the additional charm to the public that she was popularly
supposed to have no very marked fancy for priests as such ; she was a
queen, a woman, and a mother, functions, all, which priests could not
perform. Accordingly, she seems to have had little taste for mysteries
of any sort, and even the symbols that seem most mysterious were clear
to every old peasant-woman in her church. The most pleasing and
promising of them all is the woman's figure you saw on the front of the
cathedral in Paris ; her eyes bandaged ; her head bent down ; her crown

102 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

falling; without cloak or royal robe; holding in her hand a guidon or
banner with its staff broken in more than one place. On the opposite
pier stands another woman, with royal mantle, erect and commanding.
The symbol is so graceful that one is quite eager to know its meaning;
but every child in the Middle Ages would have instantly told you that
the woman with the falling crown meant only the Jewish Synagogue,
as the one with the royal robe meant the Church of Christ.

Another matter for which the female taste seemed not much to care
was theology in the metaphysical sense. Mary troubled herself little
about theology except when she retired into the south transept with
Pierre de Dreux. Even there one finds little said about the Trinity,
always the most metaphysical subtlety of the Church. Indeed, you
might find much amusement here in searching the cathedral for any
distinct expression at all of the Trinity as a dogma recognized by Mary.
One cannot take seriously the idea that the three doors, the three
portals, and the three aisles express the Trinity, because, in the first
place, there was no rule about it; churches might have what portals
and aisles they pleased; both Paris and Bourges have five; the doors
themselves are not allotted to the three members of the Trinity, nor
are the portals; while another more serious objection is that the side
doors and aisles are not of equal importance with the central, but mere
adjuncts and dependencies, so that the architect who had misled the
ignorant public into accepting so black a heresy would have deserved
the stake, and would probably have gone to it. Even this suggestion
of trinity is wanting in the transepts, which have only one aisle, and
in the choir, which has five, as well as five or seven chapels, and, as far
as an ignorant mind can penetrate, no triplets whatever. Occasionally,
no doubt, you will discover in some sculpture or window, a symbol of
the Trinity, but this discovery itself amounts to an admission of its
absence as a controlling idea, for the ordinary worshipper must have
been at least as blind as we are, and to him, as to us, it would have
seemed a wholly subordinate detail. Even if the Trinity, too, is any*

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES 103

where expressed, you will hardly find here an attempt to explain its
metaphysical meaning — not even a mystic triangle.

The church is wholly given up to the Mother and the Son. The
Father seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely. At least,
this is the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive
to be orthodox ; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-
century worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the per-
fections of Mary. Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the iden-
tity of the Mother and Son. The Son represents the Trinity, which
is thus absorbed in the Mother. The idea is not orthodox, but this is
no affair of ours. The Church watches over its own.

The Virgin's wants and tastes, positive and negative, ought now to
be clear enough to enable you to feel the artist's sincerity in trying to
satisfy them; but first you have still to convince yourselves of the
people's sincerity in employing the artists. This point is the easiest
of all, for the evidence is express. In the year 1 145 when the old fleche
was begun, — the year before Saint Bernard preached the second
crusade at Vezelay, — Abbot Haimon, of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives in
Normandy, wrote to the monks of Tutbury Abbey in England a famous
letter -to tell of the great work which the Virgin was doing in France
and which began at the Church of Chartres. " Hujus sacrae institutionis
ritus apud Carnotensem ecclesiam est inchoatus." From Chartres
it had spread through Normandy, where it produced among other
things the beautiful spire which we saw at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives.
"Postremo per totam fere Normanniam longe lateque convaluit ac
loca per singula Matri misericordiae dicata praecipue occupavit." The
movement affected especially the places devoted to Mary, but ran
through all Normandy, far and wide. Of all Mary's miracles, the best
attested, next to the preservation of her church, is the building of it;
not so much because it surprises us as because it surprised even more
the people of the time and the men who were its instruments. Such
deep popular movements are always surprising, and at Chartres the

104 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

miracle seems to have occurred three times, coinciding more or less
with the dates of the crusades, and taking the organization of a cru-
sade, as Archibishop Hugo of Rouen described it in a letter to Bishop
Thierry of Amiens. The most interesting part of this letter is the evi-
dent astonishment of the writer, who might be talking to us to-day,
so modern is he : —

The inhabitants of Chartres have combined to aid in the construction of their
church by transporting the materials; our Lord has rewarded their humble zeal
by miracles which have roused the Normans to imitate the piety of their neigh-
bours. . . . Since then the faithful of our diocese and of other neighbouring regions
have formed associations for the same object ; they admit no one into their com-
pany unless he has been to confession, has renounced enmities and revenges, and
has reconciled himself with his enemies. That done, they elect a chief, under whose
direction they conduct their waggons in silence and with humility.

The quarries at Bercheres-l'Eveque are about five miles from
Chartres. The stone is excessively hard, and was cut in blocks of con-
siderable size, as you can see for yourselves; blocks which required
great effort to transport and lay in place. The work was done with
feverish rapidity, as it still shows, but it is the solidist building of the
age, and without a sign of weakness yet. The Abbot told, with more
surprise than pride, of the spirit which was built into the cathedral
with the stone : —

Who has ever seen! — Who has ever heard tell, in times past, that powerful
princes of the world, that men brought up in honour and in wealth, that nobles,
men and women, have bent their proud and haughty necks to the harness of carts,
and that, like beasts of burden, they have dragged to the abode of Christ these
waggons, loaded with wines, grains, oil, stone, wood, and all that is necessary for
the wants of life, or for the construction of the church? But while they draw these
burdens, there is one thing admirable to observe; it is that often when a thousand
persons and more are attached to the chariots, — so great is the difficulty, — yet
they march in such silence that not a murmur is heard, and truly if one did not see
the thing with one's eyes, one might believe that among such a multitude there
was hardly a person present. When they halt on the road, nothing is heard but
the confession of sins, and pure and suppliant prayer to God to obtain pardon. At
the voice of the priests who exhort their hearts to peace, they forget all hatred,
discord is thrown far aside, debts are remitted, the unity of hearts is established.

THE VIRGIN OF CHARTRES 105

But if any one is so far advanced in evil as to be unwilling to pardon an offender,
or if he rejects the counsel of the priest who has piously advised him, his offering
is instantly thrown from the wagon as impure, and he himself ignominiously and
shamefully excluded from the society of the holy. There one sees the priests who
preside over each chariot exhort every one to penitence, to confession of faults, to
the resolution of better life! There one sees old people, young people, little chil-
dren, calling on the Lord with a suppliant voice, and uttering to Him, from the depth
of the heart, sobs and sighs with words of glory and praise! After the people,
warned by the sound of trumpets and the sight of banners, have resumed their
road, the march is made with such ease that no obstacle can retard it. . . . When
they have reached the church they arrange the wagons about it like a spiritual
camp, and during the whole night they celebrate the watch by hymns and can-
ticles. On each waggon they light tapers and lamps; they place there the infirm
and sick, and bring them the precious relics of the Saints for their relief. After-
wards the priests and clerics close the ceremony by processions which the people
follow with devout heart, imploring the clemency of the Lord and of his Blessed
Mother for the recovery of the sick.

Of course, the Virgin was actually and constantly present during all
this labour, and gave her assistance to it, but you would get no light
on the architecture from listening to an account of her miracles, nor do
they heighten the effect of popular faith. Without the conviction of
her personal presence, men would not have been inspired; but, to us,
it is rather the inspiration of the art which proves the Virgin's pres-
ence, ind we can better see the conviction of it in the work than in the
words. Every day, as the work went on, the Virgin was present, di-
recting the architects, and it is this direction that we are going to study,
if you have now got a realizing sense of what it meant. Without this
sense, the church is dead. Most persons of a deeply religious nature
would tell you emphatically that nine churches out of ten actually
were dead-born, after the thirteenth century, and that church archi-
tecture became a pure matter of mechanism and mathematics; but that
is a question for you to decide when you come to it ; and the pleasure
consists not in seeing the death, but in feeling the life.

Now let us look about!

CHAPTER VII

ROSES AND APSES

LIKE all great churches, that are not mere storehouses of theology,
Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion,
the deepest man ever felt, — the struggle of his own littleness to grasp
the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of
infinity, — the broken arch, our finite idea of space ; the spire, pointing,
with its converging lines, to unity beyond space ; the sleepless, restless
thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained
effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence, and purpose of God.
Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their
Church is another chapter. In act, all man's work ends there; — mathe-
matics, physics, chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machin-
ery science may invent, — to this favour come at last, as religion and
philosophy did before science was born. All that the centuries can do
is to express the idea differently: — a miracle or a dynamo; a dome or
a coal-pit; a cathedral or a world's fair; and sometimes to confuse the
two expressions together. The world's fair tends more and more vigor-
ously to express the thought of infinite energy; the great cathedrals of
the Middle Ages always reflected the industries and interests of a
world's fair. Chartres showed it less than Laon or Paris, for Chartres
was never a manufacturing town, but a shrine, such as Lourdes, where
the Virgin was known to have done miracles, and had been seen in
person; but still the shrine turned itself into a market and created
valuable industries. Indeed, this was the chief objection which Saint
Paul made to Ephesus and Saint Bernard to the cathedrals. They
were in some ways more industrial than religious. The mere masonry
and structure made a vast market for labour; the fixed metalwork and
woodwork were another; but the decoration was by far the greatest.

ROSES AND APSES 107

The wood-carving, the glass windows, the sculpture, inside and out,
were done mostly in workshops on the spot, but besides these fixed
qbjects, precious works of the highest perfection filled the church
treasuries. Their money value was great then ; it is greater now. No
world's fair is likely to do better to-day. After five hundred years
of spoliation, these objects fill museums still, and are bought with
avidity at every auction, at prices continually rising and quality
steadily falling, until a bit of twelfth-century glass would be a trou-
vaille like an emerald; a tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere
tourists to hope; an enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery
of the Middle Ages belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably,
if not to the State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized
the whole field of art which rested on their degradation. Royalty and
feudality spent their money rather on arms and clothes. The Church
jilone was universal patron, and the Virgin was the dictator of taste.
With the Virgin's taste, during her regency, critics never find fault.
One cannot know its whole magnificence, but one can accept it as a
matter of faith and trust, as one accepts all her other miracles without
cavilling over small details of fact. The period of eighteenth-century
scepticism about such matters and the bourgeois taste of Voltaire and
Diderot have long since passed, with the advent of a scientific taste
still more miraculous; the whole world of the Virgin's art, catalogued in
the " Dictionnaire du Mobilier Frangais" in six volumes by Viollet-le-
Duc; narrated as history by M. Labarte, M. Molinier, M. Paul La^
croix; catalogued in museums by M. du Sommerard and a score of
others, in works almost as costly as the subjects, — all the vast va-
riety of bric-^-brac, useful or ornamental, belonging to the Church,
increased enormously by the insatiable, universal, private demands
for imagery, in ivory, wood, metal, stone, for every room in every house,
or hung about every neck, or stuck on every hat, made a market such
as artists never knew before or since, and such as instantly explains
to the practical American not only the reason for the Church's tenacity

io8 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

of life, but also the inducements for its plunder. The Virgin especially
required all the resources of art, and the highest. Notre Dame of
Chartres would have laughed at Notre Dame of Paris if she had de-
tected an economy in her robes; Notre Dame of Rheims or Rouen
would have derided Notre Dame of Amiens if she had shown a femi-
nine, domestic, maternal turn toward cheapness. The Virgin was never
cheap. Her great ceremonies were as splendid as her rank of Queen
in Heaven and on Earth required ; and as her procession wound its way
along the aisles, through the crowd of her subjects, up to the high
altar, it was impossible then, and not altogether easy now, to resist
the rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and now
and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in the
religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a suspicion of
susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the road to Damas-
cus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd, grovelling at the foot
of the Cross, which, for the first time in his life, he feels.

If you want to know what churches were made for, come down
here on some great festival of the Virgin, and give yourself up to it;
but come alone ! That kind of knowledge cannot be taught and can sel-
dom be shared. We are not now seeking religion ; indeed, true religion
generally comes unsought. We are trying only to feel Gothic art. For
us, the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the stage
is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old Romanesque
leaps into the Gothic under our eyes; of a sudden, between the portal
and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new expression, always a rare
and excellent miracle in thought. The two expressions are nowhere far
apart; not further than the Mother from the Son. The new artist drops
unwillingly the hand of his father or his grandfather; he looks back,
from every corner of his own work, to see whether it goes with the
old. He will not part with the western portal or the lancet windows;
he holds close to the round columns of the choir; he would have kept
the round arch if he could, but the round arch was unable to do the

ROSES AND APSES 109

work; it could not rise; so he broke it, lifted the vaulting, threw out
flying buttresses, and satisfied the Virgin's wish.

The matter of Gothic vaulting, with its two weak points, the flying
-buttress and the false, wooden shelter-roof, is the bSte noire of the
Beaux Arts. The duty of defence does not lie on tourists, who are at
best hardly able to understand what it matters whether a wall is but-
tressed without or within, and whether a roof is single or double. No
one objects to the dome of Saint Peter's. No one finds fault with the
Pont Neuf. Yet it is true that the Gothic architect showed contempt
I (or facts. Since he could not support a heavy stone vault on his light
columns, he built the lightest possible stone vault and protected it
with a wooden' shelter-roof which constantly burned. The lightened
vaults were still too heavy for the walls and columns, so the architect
threw out buttress beyond buttress resting on separate foundations,
exposed to extreme inequalities of weather, and liable to multiplied
chances of accident. The results were certainly disastrous. The roofs
burned ; the walls yielded.

Flying buttresses were not a necessity. The Merveille had none;
the Angevin school rather affected to do without them ; Albi had none;
Assisi stands up independent; but they did give support wherever the
architect wanted it and nowhere else; they were probably cheap; and
they were graceful. Whatever expression they gave to a church, at
least it was not that of a fortress. Amiens and Albi are different reli-
gions. The expression concerns us; the construction concerns the Beaux
Arts. The problem of permanent equilibrium which distresses the
builder of arches is a technical matter which does not worry, but only
amuses, us who sit in the audience and look with delight at the theatri-
cal stage-decoration of the Gothic vault; the astonishing feat of build-
ing up a skeleton of stone ribs and vertebrae, on which every pound of
weight is adjusted, divided, and carried down from level to level till
it touches ground at a distance as a bird would alight. If any stone in
any part, from apex to foundation, weathers or gives way, the whole

no MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

must yield, and the charge for repairs is probably great, but, on the
best building the £cole des Beaux Arts can build, the charge for
repairs is not to be wholly ignored, and at least the Cathedral of
Chartres, in spite of terribly hard usage, is as solid to-day as when it
was built, and as plumb, without crack or crevice. Even the towering
fragment at Beauvais, poorly built from the first, which has broken
down of tener than most Gothic structures, and seems ready to crumble
again whenever the wind blows over its windy plains, has managed to
survive, after a fashion, six or seven hundred years, which is all that
our generation had a right to ask.

The vault of Beauvais is nearly one hundred and sixty feet high
(48 metres), and was cheaply built. The vault of Saint Peter's at Rome
is nearly one hundred and fifty feet (45 metres). That of Amiens is
one hundred and forty-four feet (44 metres). Rheims, Bourges, and
Chartres are nearly the same height ; at the entrance, one hundred and
twenty-two feet. Paris is one hundred and ten feet. The Abbe Bulteau
is responsible for these measurements; but at Chartres, as in several
very old churches, the nave slopes down to the entrance, because —
as is said — pilgrims came in such swarms that they were obliged to
sleep in the church, and the nave had to be sluiced with water to clean
it. The true height of Chartres, at the croisee of nave and transept,
is as near as possible one hundred and twenty feet (36.55 metres).

The measured height is the least interest of a church. The archi-
tect's business is to make a small building look large, and his failures
are in large buildings which he makes to look small. One chief beauty
of the Gothic is to exaggerate height, and one of its most curious quali-
ties is its success in imposing an illusion of size. Without leaving the
heart of Paris any one can study this illusion in the two great churches
of Notre Dame and Saint-Sulpice; for Saint-Sulpice is as lofty as
Notre Dame in vaulting, and larger in its other dimensions, besides
being, in its style, a fine building; yet its Roman arches show, as if
they were of the eleventh century, why the long, clean, unbroken,

CHARTRES: THE NAVE

ROSES AND APSES iii

refined lines of the Gothic, curving to points, and leading the eye with
a sort of compulsion to the culminating point above, should have made
an architectural triumph that carried all Europe off its feet with de-
light. The world had seen nothing to approach it except, perhaps, in
the dome of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople; and the discovery came
at a moment when Europe was making its most united and desperate
struggle to attain the kingdom of Heaven.

According to Viollet-le-Duc, Chartres was the final triumph of the
experiment on a very great scale, for_ Chartres has never been altered
and^never needed to be strengthened. The flying buttresses of Chartres
answered their purpose, and if it were not a matter of pure construction
it would be worth while to read what Viollet-le-Duc says about them
(article, "Arcs-boutants"). The vaulting above is heavy, about fif-
teen inches thick; the buttressing had also to be heavy; and to lighten
it, the architect devised an amusing sort of arcades, applied on his out-
side buttresses. Throughout the church, everything was solid beyond
all later custom, so that architects would have to begin by a study
of the crypt which came down from the eleventh century so strongly
built that it still carries the church without a crack in its walls; but if
we went down into it, we should understand nothing; so we will begin,
as we did outside, at the front.

A single glance shows what trouble the architect had with the old
fagade and towers, and what temptation to pull them all down. One
cannot quite say that he has spoiled his own church in trying to save
what he could of the old, but if he did not quite spoil it, he saved it
only by the exercise of an amount of intelligence that we shall never
learn enough to feel our incapacity to understand. True ignorance
approaches the infinite more nearly than any amount of knowledge
can do, and, in our case, ignorance is fortified by a certain element of
nineteenth-century indifference which refuses to be interested in what
it cannot understand; a violent reaction from the thirteenth century
which cared little to comprehend anything except the incomprehen*

112 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

sible. The architect at Chartres was required by the Virgin to provide
more space for her worshippers within the church, without destroy-
ing the old portal and fl^che which she loved. That this order came
directly from the Virgin, may be taken for granted. At Chartres, one
sees everywhere the Virgin, and nowhere any rival authority; one sees
her give orders, and architects obey them; but very rarely a hesitation
as though the architect were deciding for himself. In his western front,
the architect has obeyed orders so literally that he has not even taken
the trouble to apologize for leaving unfinished the details which, if he
had been responsible for them, would have been his anxious care. He
has gone to the trouble of moving the heavy doonvays forward, so that
the chapels in the towers, which were meant to open on a porch, now
open into the nave, and the nave itself has, in appearance, two more
spans than in the old church; but the work shows blind obedience, as
though he were doing his best to please the Virgin without trying to
please himself. Probably he could in no case have done much to help
the side aisles in their abrupt collision with the solid walls of the two
towers, but he might at least have brought the vaulting of his two new
bays, in the nave, down to the ground, and finished it. The vaulting
is awkward in these two bays, and yet he has taken great trouble to
effect what seems at first a small matter. Whether the great rose win-
dow was an afterthought or not can never be known, but any one can
see with a glass, and better on the architectural plan, that the vault-
ing of the main church was not high enough to admit the great rose,
and that the architect has had to slope his two tower-spans upward.
So great is the height that you cannot see this difference of level
very plainly even with a glass, but on the plans it seems to amount to
several feet; perhaps a metre. The architect has managed to deceive
our eyes, in order to enlarge the rose ; but you can see as plainly as
though he were here to tell you, that, like a great general, he has
concentrated his whole energy on the rose, because the Virgin has
told him that the rose symbolized herself, and that the light and

ROSES AND APSES 113

splendour of her appearance in the west were to redeem all his
awkwardnesses.

Of course this idea of the Virgin's interference sounds to you a mere
bit of fancy, and that is an account which may be settled between the
Virgin and you ; but even twentieth-century eyes can see that the rose
redeems everything, dominates everything, and gives character to the
whole church.

In view of the difficulties which faced the artist, the rose is inspired
^genius, — the kind of genius which Shakespeare showed when he took
some other man's play, and adapted it. Thus far, it shows its power
chiefly by the way it comes forward and takes possession of the west
front, but if you want a foot-rule to measure by, you may mark that
4he old, twelfth-century lancet-windows below it are not exactly in its
axis. At the outset, in the original plan of 1090, or thereabouts, the
old tower — the southern tower — was given greater width than the
northern. Such inequalities were common in the early churches, and
so is a great deal of dispute in modern books whether they were acci-
-dental or intentional, while no one denies that they are amusing. In
these towers the difference is not great, — perhaps fourteen or fifteen
inches, tr- but it caused the architect to correct it, in order to fit his
front to the axis of the church, by throwing his entrance six or seven
inches to the south, and narrowing to that extent the south door and
south lancet. The effect was bad, even then, and went far to ruin the
south window; but when, after the fire of 1194, the architect inserted
his great rose, filling every inch of possible space between the lancet
and the arch of the vault, he made another correction which threw his
rose six or seven inches out of axis with the lancets. Not one person in
a hundred thousand would notice it, here in the interior, so completely
are we under the control of the artist and the Virgin ; but it is a meas-
ure of the power of the rose.

Looking farther, one sees that the rose-motive, which so dominates
the west_front, is carried round the church, and comes to another

114 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

outburst of splendour in the transepts. This leads back to fenestra-
tion on a great scale, which is a terribly ambitious flight for tourists;
all the more, because here the tourist gets little help from the architect,
who, in modern times, has seldom the opportunity to study the sub-
ject at all, and accepts as solved the problems of early Gothic fenestra-
tion. One becomes pedantic and pretentious at the very sound of the
word, which is an intolerable piece of pedantry in itself; but Chartres
is all windows, and its windows were as triumphant as its Virgin, and
were one of her miracles. One can no more overlook the windows of
Chartres than the glass which is in them. We have already looked at
the windows of Mantes; we have seen what happened to the windows
at Paris. Paris had at one leap risen twenty-five feet higher than Noyon,
and even at Noyon, the architect, about 1150, had been obliged to
invent new fenestration. Paris and Mantes, twenty years later, made
another effort, which proved a failure. Then the architect of Chartres,
in 1 195, added ten feet more to his vault, and undertook, once for all,
to show how a great cathedral should be lighted. As an architectural
problem, it passes far beyond our powers of understanding, even when
solved; but we can always turn to see what the inevitable Viollet-le-
Duc says about its solution at Chartres: —

Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the architect of the Cathedral
of Chartres sought out entirely new window combinations to Hght the nave from
above. Below, in the side aisles he kept to the customs of the times; that is, he
opened pointed windows which did not wholly fill the spaces between the piers;
he wanted, or was willing to leave here below, the effect of a wall. But in the upper
part of his building we see that he changed the system ; he throws a round arch
directly across from one pier to the next; then, in the enormous space which
remains within each span, he inserts two large pointed windows surmounted by
a great rose. . . . We recognize in this construction of Notre Dame de Chartres
a boldness, a force, which contrast with the fumbling of the architects in the lie
de France and Champagne. For the first time one sees at Chartres the builder deal
frankly with the clerestory, or upper fenestration, occupying the whole width of
the arches, and taking the arch of the vault as the arch of the window. Simplicity
of construction, beauty in form, strong workmanship, structure true and solid,
judicious choice of material, all the characteristics of good work, unite in this
magnificent specimen of architecture at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

ROSES AND APSES 115

Viollet-le-Duc does not call attention to a score of other matters
which the architect must have had in his mind, such as the distribu-
tion of Hght, and the relations of one arrangement with another: the
nave with the aisles, and both with the transepts, and all with the
choir. Following him, we must take the choir separately, and the aisles
and chapels of the apse also. One cannot hope to understand all the
experiments and refinements of the artist, either in their successes or
their failures, but, with diffidence, one may ask one's self whether the
beauty of the arrangement, as compared with the original arrange-
ment in Paris, did not consist in retaining the rose-motive throughout,
while throwing the whole upper wall into window. Triumphant as the
clerestory windows are, they owe their charm largely to their roses, as
you see by looking at the same scheme applied on a larger scale on the
transept fronts; and then, by taking stand under the croisee, and look-
ing at all in succession as a whole.

The rose window was not Gothic but Romanesque, and needed a
great deal of coaxing to feel at home within the pointed arch. At first,
the architects felt the awkwardness so strongly that they avoided it
wherever they could. In the beautiful facade of Laon, one of the chief
beauties is the setting of the rose under a deep round arch. The
western roses of Mantes and Paris are treated in the same way, al-
though a captious critic might complain that their treatment is not so
effective or so logical. Rheims boldly imprisoned the roses within the
pointed arch ; but Amiens, toward 1240, took refuge in the same square
exterior setting that was preferred, in 1200, here at Chartres; and in
the interior of Amiens the round arch of the rose is the last vault of the
nave, seen through a vista of pointed vaults, as it is here. All these are
supposed to be among the chief beauties of the Gothic facade, al-
though the Gothic architect, if he had been a man of logic, would have
clung to his lines, and put a pointed window in his front, as in fact he
did at Coutances. He felt the value of the rose in art, and perhaps still
more in religion, for the rose was Mary's emblem. One is fairly sure

ii6 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

that the great Chartres rose of the west front was put there to please
her, since it was to be always before her eyes, the most conspicuous
object she would see from the high altar, and therefore the most care-
fully considered ornament in the whole church, outside the choir. The
mere size proves the importance she gave it. The exterior diameter is
nearly forty-four feet (13.36 metres). The nave of Chartres is, next
perhaps to the nave of Angers, the widest of all Gothic naves; about
fifty- three feet (16.31 metres) ; and the rose takes every inch it can get
of this enormous span. The value of the rose, among architects of the
time, was great, since it was the only part of the church that Villard de
Honnecourt sketched; and since his time, it has been drawn and re-
drawn, described and commented by generations of architects till it
has become as classic as the Parthenon.

Yet this Chartres rose is solid, serious, sedate, to a degree unusual
in its own age ; it is even more Romanesque than the pure Romanesque
roses. At Beauvais you must stop a moment to look at a Romanesque
rose on the transept of the Church of Saint-Etienne; Viollet-le-Duc
mentions it, with a drawing (article, " Pignon "), as not earlier than the
year iioo, therefore about a century earlier than the rose of Chartres;
it is not properly a rose, but a wheel of fortune, with figures climbing
up and falling over. Another supposed twelfth-century rose is at
Etampes, which goes with that of Laon and Saint-Leu-d'Esserent and
Mantes. The rose of Chartres is so much the most serious of them all
that Viollet-le-Duc has explained it by its material, — the heavy stone
of Berch^res; — but the material was not allowed to affect the great
transept roses, and the architect made his material yield to his object
wherever he thought it worth while. Standing under the central
crois^e, you can see all three roses by simply turning your head. That
on the north, the Rose de France, was built, or planned, between 1200
and 1210, in the reign of Philip Augustus, since the porch outside,
which would be a later construction, was begun by 12 12. The Rose de
France is the same in diameter as the western rose, but lighter, and

ROSES AND APSES 117

built of lighter stone. Opposite the Rose de France stands, on the
south front, Pierre Mauclerc's Rose de Dreux, of the same date, with
the same motive, but even lighter; more like a rose and less like a
wheel. All three roses must have been planned at about the same time,
perhaps by the same architect, within the same workshop; yet the
western rose stands quite apart, as though it had been especially
designed to suit the twelfth-century fagade and portal which it rules.
Whether this was really the artist's idea is a question that needs the
artist to answer; but that this is the effect, needs no expert to prove; it
stares one in the face. Within and without, one feels that the twelfth-
century spirit is respected and preserved with the same_religious feel-
ing which obliged the architect to injure his own work by sparing that
of his grandfathers.

Conspicuous, then, in the west front are two feelings: — respect for
the twelfth-century work, and passion for the rose fenestration ; both
subordinated to the demand for light. If it worries you to have to
believe that these three things are in fact one; that the architect is
listening, like the stone Abraham, for orders from the Virgin, while he
caresses and sacrifices his child; that Mary and not her architects built
this fagade;if the divine intention seems to you a needless imperti-
nence, you can soon get free from it by going to any of the later
churches, where you will not be forced to see any work but that of the
architect's compasses. According to Viollet-le-Duc, the inspiration
ceased about 1250, or, as the Virgin would have dated it, on the death
of Blanche of Castile in 1252. The work of Chartres, where her own
hand is plainly shown, belongs in feeling, if not in execution, to the
last years of the twelfth century (i 195-1200). The great western
rose which gives the motive for the whole decoration and is repeated
in the great roses of the transepts, marks the Virgin's will, — the
taste and knowledge of "cele qui la rose est des roses," or, if you pre-
fer the Latin of Adam de Saint- Victor, the hand of her who is "Super
rosam rosida."

ii8 . MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

All this is easy; but if you really cannot see the hand of Mary
herself in these broad and public courts, which were intended, not for
her personal presence, but for the use of her common people, you had
better stop here, and not venture into the choir. Great halls seem to
have been easy architecture. Naves and transepts were not often fail-
ures; fagades and even towers and fleches are invariably more or less
successful because they are more or less balanced, mathematical, cal-
culable products of reason and thought. The most serious difficulties
began only with the choir, and even then did not become desperate
until the architect reached the curve of the apse, with its impossible
vaultings, its complicated lines, its cross-thrusts, its double problems,
internal and external, its defective roofing and unequal lighting. A
perfect Gothic apse was impossible ; an apse that satisfied perfectly its
principal objects was rare; the simplest and cheapest solution was to
have no apse at all, and that was the English scheme, which was tried
also at Laon; a square, flat wall and window. If the hunt for Norman
towers offered a summer's amusement, a hunt for apses would offer an
education, but it would lead far out of France. Indeed, it would be
simpler to begin at once with Sancta Sophia at Constantinople, San
Vitale at Ravenna and Monreale at Palermo, and the churches at
Torcello and Murano, and San Marco at Venice; and admit that no
device has ever equalled the startling and mystical majesty of the
Byzantine half-dome, with its marvellous mosaic Madonna dominating
the church, from the entrance, with her imperial and divine presence.
Unfortunately, the northern churches needed light, and the northern
architects turned their minds to a desperate effort for a new apse.

The scheme of the cathedral at Laon seems to have been rejected
unanimously; the bare, flat wall at the end of the choir was an eyesore;
it was quite bad enough at the end of the nave, and became annoying
at the end of the transepts, so that at Noyon and Soissons the archi-
tect, with a keen sense of interior form, had rounded the transept ends;
but, though external needs might require a square transept, the unin-

ROSES AND APSES

119

telHgence of the flat wall became insufferable at the east end. Neither
did the square choir suit the church ceremonies and processions, or
offer the same advantages of arrangement, as the French understood
them. With one voice, the French architects seem to have rejected the
Laon experiment, and turned back to a solution taken directly from
the Romanesque.

Quite early — in the eleventh century — a whole group of churches
had been built in Auvergne, — at Clermont and Issoire, for example,
— possibly by one architect, with a
circular apse, breaking out into five
apsidal chapels. Tourists who get
down as far south as Toulouse see
another example of this Romanesque
apse in the famous Church of Saint-
Sernin, of the twelfth century; and
few critics take offence at one's liking
it. Indeed, as far as concerns the ex-
terior, one might even risk thinking
it more charming than the exterior of

any Gothic apse ever built. Many of these Romanesque apses of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries still remain in France, showing them-
selves in unsuspected parish churches, here and there, but always a
surprise for their quiet, unobtrusive grace, making a harmony with the
Romanesque tower, if there is one, into which they rise, as at Saint-
Sernin ; but all these churches had only one aisle, and, in the interior,
there came invariable trouble when the vaults rose in height. The
architect of Chartres, in 1200, could get no direct help from these, or
even from Paris which was a beautifully perfect apse, but had no
apsidal chapels. The earliest apse that could have served as a sugges-
tion for Chartres — or, at least, as a point of observation for us —
was that of the Abbey Church of Saint-lNIartin-des-Champs, which
we went to see in Paris, and which is said to date from about 11 50.

Saint-Martin-des-Champs

120

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

VfizELAY

Here is a circular choir, surrounded by two rows of columns, irregularly
spaced, with circular chapels outside, which seems to have been more
or less what the architect of Chartres, for the Virgin's purposes, had
set his heart on obtaining. Closely following the scheme of Saint-
Martin - des -Champs
came the scheme of
the Abbey Church at
Vezelay, built about
1 160-80. Here the
vaulting sprang di-
rectly from the last
arch of the choir, as
is shown on the plan,
and bearing first on
the light columns of
the choir, which were
evenly spaced, then fell on a row of heavier columns outside, which
were also evenly spaced, and came to rest at last on massive piers,
between which were five circular chapels. The plan shows at a glance
that this arrangement stretched the second row of columns far apart,
and that a church much larger than Vezelay would need to space
them so much farther apart that the arch uniting them would have
to rise indefinitely; while, if beyond this, another aisle were added
outside, the piers finally would require impossible vaulting.

The problem stood thus when the great cathedrals were undertaken,
and the architect of Paris boldly grappled with the double aisle on a
scale requiring a new scheme. Here, in spite of the most virtuous
resolutions not to be technical, we must attempt a technicality,
because without it, one of the most interesting eccentricities of Char-
tres would be lost. Once more, Viollet-Ie-Duc: —

As the architect did not want to give the interior bays of the apse spaces between
the columns (AA) less than that of the parallel bays (BB), it followed that the first

ROSES AND APSES

121

radiating bay gave a first space (LMGH) which was difficult to vault, and a second
space (HGEF) which was impossible ; for how establish an arch from F to E? Even
if round, its key would have risen much higher than the key of the pointed archU
volt LM. As the second radiating bay opened out still wider, the difficulty was
increased. The builder therefore inserted the two intermediate pillars O and P
between the columns of the second aisle (H, G, and I) ; which he supported, in the
outside wall of the church, by one corresponding pier (Q) in the first bay of the
apse, and by two similar piers (R and S) in the second bay.

"There is no need to point out," continued VioIIet-le-Duc, as though
he much suspected that there might be need of pointing out, "what
skill this system showed and how much
the art of architecture had already

been developed in the He de France
toward the end of the twelfth cen-
tury; to what an extent the unity of
arrangement and style preoccupied the
artists of that province."

In fact, the arrangement seems
mathematically and technically per-
fect. At all events, we know too little
to criticize it. Yet one would much
like to be told why it was not repeated
by any other architect or in any other
church. Apparently the Parisians them-
selves were not quite satisfied with it,
since they altered it a hundred years later, in 1296, in order to build
out chapels between the piers. As the architects of each new cathe-
dral had, in the interval, insisted on apsidal chapels, one may venture
to guess that the Paris scheme hampered the services.

At Chartres the church services are Mary's own tastes; the church
is Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms. She was not pleased
with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were
too architectural; too regular and mathematical i too popular; too

Notre Dame de Paris

122

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

impersonal ; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at Chartres
to go back to the old arrangement. The apse at Paris was hardly

covered with its leading be-
fore the architect of Chartres
adopted a totally new plan,
which, according to Viollet-
le-Duc, does him little credit,
but which was plainly im-
posed on him, like the twelfth-
century portal. Not only had
it nothing of the mathemati-
cal correctness and precision
of the Paris scheme, easy to
understand and imitate, but it
carried even a sort of violence
— a wrench — in its system,
as though the Virgin had
said, with her grand Byzan-
tine air: — I will it!

"At Chartres," said Viol-
let-le-Duc, "the choir of the Cathedral presents a plan which does
no great honour to its architect. There is want of accord, between
the circular apse and the parallel sides of the sanctuary; the spac-
ings of the columns of the second collateral are loose {laches) ; the
vaults quite poorly combined; and in spite of the great width of
the spaces between the columns of the second aisle, the architect had
still to narrow those between the interior columns."

The plan shows that, from the first, the architect must have delib-
erately rejected the Paris scheme; he must have begun by narrowing
the spaces between his inner columns; then, with a sort of violence,
he fitted on his second row of columns; and, finally, he showed his
motive by constructing an outer wall of an original or unusual shape.

Chartres

ROSES AND APSES

123

Any woman would see at once the secret of all this ingenuity and ef-
fort. The Chartres apse, enormous in size and width, is exquisitely
lighted. Here, as everywhere throughout the church, the windows
give the law, but here they actually take place of law. The Virgin her-
self saw to the lighting of her own boudoir. According to Viollet-le-
Duc, Chartres differs from all the other great cathedrals by being built
not for its nave or even for its choir, but for its apse; it was planned
not for the people or the court, but for the Queen; not a church but
a shrine; and the shrine is the apse where the Queen arranged her
Hght to please herself and not her architect, who had already been
sacrificed at the western ,
portal and who had a free
hand only in the nave
and transepts where the
Queen never went, and
which, from her own
apartment, she did not
even see.

This is, in effect, what
Viollet-le-Duc says in
his professional language,
which is perhaps — or
sounds — more reasona-
ble to tourists, whose
imaginations are hardly
equal to the effort of fan-
cying a real deity. Per-
haps, indeed, one might
get so high as to imagine
a real Bishop of Laon,
who should have ordered his architect to build an enormous hall of
religion, to rival the immense abbeys of the day, and to attract the

Laon

124

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

people, as though it were a clubroom. There they were to see all

the great sights ; church cere-
monies; theatricals; political
functions; there they were to
do business, and frequent
society. They were to feel at
home in their church because
it was theirs, and did not
belong to a priesthood or to
Rome. Jealousy of Rome was
a leading motive of Gothic
architecture, and Rome re-
paid it in full. The Bishop
of Laon conceded at least a
transept to custom or tradi-
tion, but the Archbishop of
Bourges abolished even the
transept, and the great hall
Bourges j^^j j^q special religious ex-

pression except in the circular apse with its chapels which Laon
had abandoned. One can hardly decide whether Laon or Bourges is
the more popular, indus-
trial, political, or, in other
words, the less religious;
but the Parisians, as the
plan of Viollet-le-Duc has
shown, were quite as ad-
vanced as either, and
only later altered their
scheme into one that pro-
vided chapels for religious
service. Amiens

ROSES AND APSES

123

Amiens and Beauvais have each seven chapels, but only one aisle,
so that they do not belong in the same class with the apses of Paris,
Bourges, and Chartres, though the plans are worth studying for
comparison, since they show how many-sided the problem was, and
how far from satisfied the architects were with their own schemes.
The most interesting of all, for comparison with Chartres, is Le
Mans, where the apsidal chapels are carried to fanaticism, while
the vaulting seems to be reasonable enough, and the double aisle suc-
cessfully managed, if VioUet-le-Duc permits ignorant people to form
an opinion on architectural
dogma. For our purposes,
the architectural dogma
may stand, and the Paris
scheme may be taken for
granted , as alone correct and
orthodox; all that Viollet-
le-Duc teaches is that the
Chartres scheme is unortho-
dox, not to say heretical;
and this is the point on
which his words are most
interesting.

The church at Chartres
belonged not to the people,
not to the priesthood, and
not even to Rome; it be-
longed to the Virgin. " Here
the religious influence ap-
pears wholly; tliree large
chapels in the apse; four

others less pronounced; double aisles of great width round the choir;
vast transeplal Here the church ceremonial could display all its pomp;

Beauvais

126

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

the choir, more than at Paris, more than at Bourges, more than at
Soissons, and especially more than at Laon, is the principal object; for
it, the church is built."
. One who is painfully conscious of ignorance, and who never would

Le Mans

dream of suggesting a correction to anybody, may not venture to sug-
gest an idea of any sort to an architect; but if it were allowed to para-
phrase Viollet-le-Duc's words into a more or less emotional or twelfth-
century form, one might say, after him, that, compared with Paris
or Laon, the Chartres apse shows the same genius that is shown
in the Chartres rose ; the same large mind that overrules, — the same
strong will that defies difificulties. The Chartres apse is as entertaining

ROSES AND APSES 127

^as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the

^^architect- You may, if you really have no imagination whatever,

reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the feebleness

of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant or strych-

Chaxtkes

nine, and we shrink like sensitive-plants from the touch of a vision
or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a woman's taste,
and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.

CHAPTER VIII

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS

AT last we are face to face with the crowning glory of Chartres.
Other churches have glass, — quantities of it, and very fine, —
but we have been trying to catch a glimpse of the glory which stands
behind the glass of Chartres, and gives it quality and feeling of its
own. For once the architect is useless and his explanations are pitiable;
the painter helps still less; and the decorator, unless he works in glass,
is the poorest guide of all, while, if he works in glass, he is sure to lead
wrong; and all of them may toil until Pierre Mauclerc's stone Christ
comes to life, and condemns them among the unpardonable sinners on
the southern portal, but neither they nor any other artist will ever
create another Chartres. You had better stop here, once for all, unless
you are willing to feel that Chartres was made what it is, not by the
artist, but by the Virgin.

If this imperial presence is stamped on the architecture and the
sculpture with an energy not to be mistaken, it radiates through the
glass with a light and colour that actually blind the true servant of
Mary. One becomes, sometimes, a little incoherent in talking about
it; one is ashamed to be as extravagant as one wants to be; one has no
business to labour painfully to explain and prove to one's self what is
as clear as the sun in the sky; one loses temper in reasoning about what
can only be felt, and what ought to be felt instantly, as it was in the
twelfth century, even by the truie qui file and the ane qui vielle. Any
one should feel it that wishes; any one who does not wish to feel it can
let it alone. Still, it may be that not one tourist in a hundred — per-
haps not one in a thousand of the English-speaking race — does feel
it, or can feel it even when explained to him, for we have lost many
senses.

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 129

Therefore, let us plod on, laboriously proving God, although, even
to Saint Bernard and Pascal, God was incapable of proof; and using;
such material as the books furnish for help. It is not much. The
French have been shockingly negligent of their greatest artistic glory.
One knows not even where to seek. One must go to the National
Library and beg as a special favour permission to look at the monu-
mental work of M. Lasteyrie, if one wishes to make even a beginning
of the study of French glass. Fortunately there exists a fragment of
a great work which the Government began, but never completed, upon
Chartres; and another, quite indispensable, but not official, upon
Bourges; while Viollet-le-Duc's article "Vitrail" serves as guide to
the whole. Ottin's book "Le Vitrail" is convenient. Male's volume
"L'Art Religieux" is essential. In English, Westlake's "History of
Design ' is helpful. Perhaps, after reading all that is readable, the
best hope will be to provide the best glasses with the largest possible
field; and, choosing an hour when the church is empty, take seat
about halfway up the nave, facing toward the western entrance with
a morning light, so that the glass of the western windows shall not
stand in direct sun.

The glass of the three lancets is the oldest in the cathedral. If the
portal beneath it, with the sculpture, was built in the twenty or thirty
years before 11 50, the glass could not be much later. It goes with
the Abbe Suger's glass at Saint-Denis, which was surely made as early
as 1140-50, since the Abb6 was a long time at work on it, before he
died in 1152, Their perfection proves, what his biographer asserted,
that the Abbe Suger spent many years as well as much money on his
windows at Saint-Denis, and the specialists affirm that the three lancets
at Chartres are quite as good as what remains of Suger's work. Viollet-
le-Duc and M. Paul Durand, the Government expert, are positive tha^
this glass is the finest ever made, as far as record exists; and that th?
northern lancet representing the Tree of Jesse stands at the head of al)
glasswork whatever. The windows claim, therefore, to be the most

130 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

splendid colour decoration the world ever saw, since no other material,
neither silk nor gold, and no opaque colour laid on with a brush, can
compare with translucent glass, and even the Ravenna mosaics or
Chinese porcelains are darkness beside them.

The claim may not be modest, but it is none of ours. Viollet-le-
Duc must answer for his own sins, and he chose the lancet window of
the Tree of Jesse for the subject of his lecture on glass in general, as
the most complete and perfect example of this greatest decorative
art. Once more, in following him, one is dragged, in spite of one's self,
into technique, and, what is worse, into a colour world whose technique
was forgotten five hundred years ago. Viollet-le-Duc tried to recover
it. "After studying our best French windows," he cautiously suggests
that "one might maintain," as their secret of harmony, that "the first
condition for an artist in glass is to know how to manage blue. The
blue is the light in windows, and light has value only by opposition."
The radiating power of blue is, therefore, the starting-point, and on
this matter Viollet-le-Duc has much to say which a student would
need to master; but a tourist never should study, or he ceases to be a
tourist; and it is enough for us if we know that, to get the value they
wanted, the artists hatched their blues with lines, covered their sur-
face with figures as though with screens, and tied their blue within
its own field with narrow circlets of white or yellow, which, in their
turn, were beaded to fasten the blue still more firmly in its place. We
have chiefly to remember the law that blue is light: —

But also it is that luminous colour which gives value to all others. If you com-
pose a window in which there shall be no blue, you will get a dirty or dull (blafard)
or crude surface which the eye will instantly avoid ; but if you put a few touches
of blue among all these tones, you will immediately get striking effects if not
skilfully conceived harmony. So the composition of blue glass singularly preoccu-
pied the glassworkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If there is only
one red, two yellows, two or three purples, and two or three greens at the most,
there are infinite shades of blue, . . . and these blues are placed with a very deli-
cate observation of the effects they should produce on other tones, and other tones
on them.

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 131

Viollet-le-Duc took the window of the Tree of Jesse as his first
illustration of the rule, for the reason that its blue ground is one con-
tinuous strip from top to bottom, with the subordinate red on either
side, and a border uniting the whole so plainly that no one can fail to
see its object or its method.

The blue tone of the principal subject [that is to say, the ground of the Tree
of Jesse] has commanded the tonality of all the rest. This medium was necessary
to enable the luminous splendour to display its energy. This primary condition
had dictated the red ground for the prophets, and the return to the blue on reach-
ing the outside semicircular band. To give full value both to the vigour of the red,
and to the radiating transparency of the blue, the ground of the corners is put in
emerald green; but then, in the corners themselves, the blue is recalled and is
given an additional solidity of value by the delicate ornamentation of the squares.

This translation is very free, but one who wants to know these
windows must read the whole article, and read it here in the church,
the Dictionary in one hand, and binocle in the other, for the binocle is
more important than the Dictionary when it reaches the complicated
border which repeats in detail the colour-scheme of the centre: —

The border repeats all the tones allotted to the principal subjects, but by small
fragments, so that this border, with an effect both solid and powerful, shall not
enter into rivalry with the large arrangements of the central parts.

One would think this simple enough; easily tested on any illumi-
nated manuscript, Arab, Persian, or Byzantine; verified by any Orien-
tal rug, old or new; freely illustrated by any Chinese pattern on a Ming
jar, or cloisonn6 vase; and offering a kind of alphabet for the shop-
window of a Paris modiste. A strong red ; a strong and a weak yellow;
a strong and a weak purple; a strong and a weak green, are all to be
tied together, given their values, and held in their places by blue. The
thing seems simpler still when it appears that perspective is forbidden,
and that these glass windows of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
like Oriental rugs, imply a flat surface, a wall which must not be treated
as open. The twelfth-century glassworker would sooner have worn a
landscape on his back than have costumed his church with it ; he would

132 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

as soon have decorated his floors with painted holes as his walls. He
wanted to keep the coloured window flat, like a rug hung on the wall.

The radiation of translucent colours in windows cannot be modified by the art-
ist ; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according to a given harmonic scheme
on a single plane, like a rug, but not according to an effect of aerial perspective.
Do what you like, a glass window never does and never can represent anything
but a plane surface; its real virtues even exist only on that condition. Every at-
tempt to present several planes to the eye is fatal to the harmony of colour, with-
out producing any illusion in the spectator. . . . Translucid painting can pro-
pose as its object only a design supporting as energetically as possible a harmony
of colours.

Whether this law is absolute you can tell best by looking at modern
glass which is mostly perspective ; but, whether you like it or not, the
matter of perspective does not enter into a twelfth-century window
more than into a Japanese picture, and may be ignored. The decora-
tion of the twelfth century, as far as concerns us, was intended only
for one plane, and a window was another form of rug or embroidery
or mosaic, hung on the wall for colour, — simple decoration to be seen
as a whole. If the Tree of Jesse teaches anything at all, it is that the
artist thought first of controlling his light, but he wanted to do it not
in order to dim the colours; on the contrary, he toiled, like a jeweller
setting diamonds and rubies, to increase their splendour. If his use
of blue teaches this lesson, his use of green proves it. The outside bor-
der of the Tree of Jesse is a sort of sample which our schoolmaster
Viollet-le-Duc sets, from which he requires us to study out the scheme,
beginning with the treatment of light, and ending with the value of the
emerald green ground in the corners.

Complicated as the border of the Tree of Jesse is, it has its mates
in the borders of the two other twelfth-century windows, and a few
of the thirteenth-century in the side aisles; but the southern of the
three lancets shows how the artists dealt with a difficulty that upset
their rule. The border of the southern window does not count as it
•should; something is wrong with it and a little study shows that the

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 133

builder, and not the glassworker, was to blame. Owing to his mis-
calculation — if it was really a miscalculation — in the width of the
southern tower, the builder economized six or eight inches in the south-
ern door and lancet, which was enough to destroy the balance between
the colour-values, as masses, of the south and north windows. The
artist was obliged to choose whether he would sacrifice the centre or
the border of his southern window, and decided that the windows
could not be made to balance if he narrowed the centre, but that he
must balance them by enriching the centre, and sacrificing the border.
He has filled the centre with medallions as rich as he could make them,
and these he has surrounded with borders, which are also enriched to
the utmost; but these medallions with their borders spread across the
whole window, and when you search with the binocle for the outside
border, you see its pattern clearly only at the top and bottom. On the
sides, at intervals of about two feet, the medallions cover and inter-
rupt it; but this is partly corrected by making the border, where it is
seen, so rich as to surpass any other in the cathedral, even that of the
Tree of Jesse. Whether the artist has succeeded or not is a question
for other artists — or for you, if you please — to decide; but appar-
ently he did succeed, since no one has ever noticed the difficulty or
the device.

The southern lancet represents the Passion of Christ. Granting to
Viollet-le-Duc that the unbroken vertical colour-scheme of the Tree of
Jesse made the more effective window, one might still ask whether
the medallion-scheme is not the more interesting. Once past the work-
shop, there can be no question about it; the Tree of Jesse has the least
interest of all the three windows. A genealogical tree has little value,
artistic or other, except to those who belong in its branches, and the
Tree of Jesse was put there, not to please us, but to please the Virgin.
The Passion window was also put there to please her, but it tells a
story, and does it in a way that has more novelty than the subject.
The draughtsman who chalked out the design on the whitened table

134 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

that served for his sketch-board was either a Greek, or had before him
a Byzantine missal, or enamel or ivory. The first medallion on these
.legendary windows is the lower left-hand one, which begins the story
or legend; here it represents Christ after the manner of the Greek
Church. In the next medallion is the Last Supper; the fish on the dish
is Greek. In the middle of the window, with the help of the binocle, you
will see a Crucifixion, or even two, for on the left is Christ on the Cross,
and on the right a Descent from the Cross; in this is the figure of a
man pulling out with pincers the nails which fasten Christ's feet;
a figure unknown to Western religious art. The Noli Me Tangere, on
the right, near the top, has a sort of Greek character. All the critics,
especially M. Paul Durand, have noticed this Byzantine look, which
is even more marked in the Suger window at Saint-Denis, so as to
suggest that both are by the same hand, and that the hand of a Greek.
If the artist was really a Greek, he has done work more beautiful than
any left at Byzantium, and very far finer than anything in the beau-
tiful work at Cairo, but although the figures and subjects are more or
less Greek, like the sculptures on the portal, the art seems to be French.
Look at the central window! Naturally, there sits the Virgin, with
her genealogical tree on her left, and her Son's testimony on her right,
to prove her double divinity. She is seated in the long halo; as, on the
western portal, directly beneath her, her Son is represented in stone.
Her crown and head, as well as that of the Child, are fourteenth-
century restorations more or less like the original ; but her cushioned
throne and her robes of imperial state, as well as the flowered sceptre
in either hand, are as old as the sculpture of the portal, and redolent of
the first crusade. On either side of her, the Sun and the Moon offer
praise; her two Archangels, Michael and Gabriel, with resplendent
wings, offer not incense as in later times, but the two sceptres of spirit-
ual and temporal power; while the Child in her lap repeats His Mother's
action and even her features and expression. At first sight, one would
take for granted that all this was pure Byzantium, and perhaps it is;

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 135

but it has rather the look of Byzantium gallicized, and carried up to a
poetic French ideal. At Saint-Denis the little figure of the Abb6 Suger
at the feet of the Virgin has a very Oriental look, and in the twin me-
dallion the Virgin resembles greatly the Virgin of Chartres, yet, for us,
until some specialist shows us the Byzantine original, the work is as
thoroughly French as the filches of the churches.

Byzantine art is altogether another chapter, and, if we could but
take a season to study it in Byzantium, we might get great amusement;
but the art of Chartres, even in 1 100, was French and perfectly French,
as the architecture shows, and the glass is even more French than the
architecture, as you can detect in many other ways. Perhaps the surest
evidence is the glass itself. The men who made it were not professionals
but amateurs, who may have had some knowledge of enamelling, but
who worked like jewellers, unused to glass, and with the refinement that
a reliquary or a crozier required. The cost of these windows must have
been extravagant; one is almost surprised that they are not set in gold
rather than in lead. The Abb6 Suger shirked neither trouble nor
expense, and the only serious piece of evidence that this artist was a
Greek is given by his biographer who unconsciously shows that the
artist cheated him: "He sought carefully for makers of windows and
workmen in glass of exquisite quality, especially in that made of sap-
phires in great abundance that were pulverized and melted up in the
glass to give it the blue colour which he delighted to admire." The
"materia saphirorum" was evidently something precious, — as pre-
cious as crude sapphires would have been, — and the words imply
beyond question that the artist asked for sapphires and that Suger
paid for them; yet all specialists agree that the stone known as sap-
phire, if ground, could not produce translucent colour at all. The blue
which Suger loved, and which is probably the same as that of these
Chartres windows, cannot be made out of sapphires. Probably the
"materia saphirorum" means cobalt only, but whatever it was, the
glassmakers seem to agree that this glass of 1140-50 is the best ever

136 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

made. M. Paul Durand in his official report of 1881 said that these
windows, both artistically and mechanically, were of the highest class:
" I will also call attention to the fact that the glass and the execution
of the painting are, materially speaking, of a quality much superior
to windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Having
passed several months in contact with these precious works when I
copied them, I was able to convince myself of their superiority in
every particular, especially in the upper parts of the three windows."
He said that they were perfect and irreproachable. The true enthusi-
ast in glass would in the depths of his heart like to say outright that
these three windows are worth more than all that the French have
since done in colour, from that day to this ; but the matter concerns us
chiefly because it shows how French the experiment was, and how
Suger's taste and wealth made it possible.

Certain it is, too, that the southern window — the Passion — was
made on the spot, or near by, and fitted for the particular space with
care proportionate to its cost. All are marked by the hand of the
Chartres Virgin. They are executed not merely for her, but by her.
At Saint-Denis the Abbe Suger appeared, — it is true that he was
prostrate at her feet, but still he appeared. At Chartres no one — no
suggestion of a human agency — was allowed to appear; the Virgin
permitted no one to approach her, even to adore. She is enthroned
above, as Queen and Empress and Mother, with the symbols of exclu-
sive and universal power. Below her, she permitted the world to see
the glories of her earthly life; — the Annunciation, Visitation, and
Nativity ; the Magi ; King Herod ; the Journey to Egypt ; and the single
medallion, which shows the gods of Egypt falling from their pedestab
at her coming, is more entertaining than a whole picture-gallery of oil
paintings.

In all France there exist barely a dozen good specimens of twelfth-
century glass. Besides these windows at Chartres and the fragments
at Saint-Denis, there are windows at Le Mans and Angers and bits at

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 137

Vend&me, Chalons, Poitiers, Rheims, and Bourges; here and there one
happens on other pieces, but the earliest is the best, because the glass-
makers were new at the work and spent on it an infinite amount of
trouble and money which they found to be unnecessary as they gained
experience. Even in 1200 the value of these windows was so well
understood, relatively to new ones, that they were preserved with the
greatest care. The effort to make such windows was never repeated.
Their jewelled perfection did not suit the scale of the vast churches of
the thirteenth century. By turning your head toward the windows of
the side aisles, you can see the criticism which the later artists passed
on the old work. They found it too refined, too brilliant, too jewel-like
, for the size of the new cathedral; the play of light and colour allowed
the eye too little repose; indeed, the eye could not see their whole
beauty, and half their value was thrown away in this huge stone set-
ting. At best they must have seemed astray on the bleak, cold, windy
plain of Beauce, — homesick for Palestine or Cairo, — yearning for
Monreale or Venice, — but this is not our affair, and, under the pro-
tection of the Empress Virgin, Saint Bernard himself could have
afforded to sin even to drunkenness of colour. With trifling expense of
imagination one can still catch a glimpse of the crusades in the glory
of the glass. The longer one looks into it, the more overpowering it
becomes, until one begins almost to feel an echo of what our two
hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors, drunk with the
passion of youth and the splendour of the Virgin, have been calling to
us from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. No words and no wine
could revive their emotions so vividly as they glow in the purity of the
colours; the limpidity of the blues; the depth of the red; the intensity
of the green ; the complicated harmonies ; the sparkle and splendour of
the light; and the quiet and certain strength of the mass.

With too strong direct sun the windows are said to suffer, and be-
come a cluster of jewels — a delirium of coloured light. The lines, too,
have different degrees of merit. These criticisms seldom strike a

138 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

chance traveller, but he invariably makes the discovery that the de-
signs within the medallions are childish. He may easily correct them,
if he likes, and see what would happen to the window; but although
this is the alphabet of art, and we are past spelling words of one sylla-
ble, the criticism teaches at least one lesson. Primitive man seems to
have had a natural colour-sense, instinctive like the scent of a dog.
Society has no right to feel it as a moral reproach to be told that it has
reached an age when it can no longer depend, as in childhood, on its
taste, or smell, or sight, or hearing, or memory; the fact seems likely
enough, and in no way sinful; yet society always denies it, and is
invariably angry about it; and, therefore, one had better not say it.
On the other hand, we can leave Delacroix and his school to fight out
the battle they began against Ingres and his school, in French art,
nearly a hundred years ago, which turned in substance on the same
point. Ingres held that the first motive in colour-decoration was line,
and that a picture which was well drawn was well enough coloured.
Society seemed, on the whole, to agree with him. Society in the
twelfth century agreed with Delacroix. The French held then that the
first point in colour-decoration was colour, and they never hesitated
to put their colour where they wanted it, or cared whether a green
camel or a pink lion looked like a dog or a donkey provided they got
their harmony or value. Everything except colour was sacrificed to
line in the large sense, but details of drawing were conventional and
subordinate. So we laugh to see a knight with a blue face, on a green
horse, that looks as though drawn by a four-year-old child, and prob-
ably the artist laughed, too; but he was a colourist, and never sacri-
ficed his colour for a laugh.

We tourists assume commonly that he knew no better. In our sim-
ple faith in ourselves, great hope abides, for it shows an earnestness
hardly less than that of the crusaders; but in the matter of colour one
is perhaps less convinced, or more open to curiosity. No school, of
colour exists in our world to-day, while the Middle Ages had a dozen;

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 139

but it is certainly true that these twelfth-century windows break the
French tradition. They had no antecedent, and no fit succession. All
the authorities dwell on their exceptional character. One is sorely
tempted to suspect that they were in some way an accident; that such
an art could not have sprung, in such perfection, out of nothing, had it
been really French ; that it must have had its home elsewhere — on the
Rhine — in Italy — in Byzantium — or in Bagdad.

The same controversy has raged for near two hundred years over the
Gothic arch, and everything else mediaeval, down to the philosophy
of the schools. The generation that lived during the first and second
crusades tried a number of original experiments, besides capturing
Jerusalem. Among other things, it produced the western portal of
Chartres, with its statuary, its glass, and its fl^che, as a by-play; as
it produced Ab^lard, Saint Bernard, and Christian of Troyes, whose
acquaintance we have still to make. It took ideas wherever it found
them; — from Germany, Italy, Spain, Constantinople, Palestine, or
from the source which has always attracted the French mind like a
magnet — from ancient Greece. That it actually did take the ideas,
no one disputes, except perhaps patriots who hold that even the ideas
were original ; but to most students the ideas need to be accounted for
less than the taste with which they were handled, and the quickness
with which they were developed. That the taste was French, you can
see in the architecture, or you will see if ever you meet the Gothic else-
where; that it seized and developed an idea quickly, you have seen in
the arch, the fl^che, the porch, and the windows, as well as in the glass;
but what we do not comprehend, and never shall, is the appetite
behind all this; the greed for novelty: the fun of life. Every one who
has lived since the sixteenth century has felt deep distrust of every one
who lived before it, and of every one who believed in the Middle Ages.
True it is that the last thirteenth-century artist died a long time before
our planet began its present rate of revolution; it had to come to rest,
»ad begin again; but this does not prevent astonishment that the

140 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

twelfth-century planet revolved so fast. The pointed arch not only
came as an idea into France, but it was developed into a system of
architecture and covered the country with buildings on a scale of
height never before attempted except by the dome, with an expendi-
ture of wealth that would make a railway system look cheap, all in a
space of about fifty years; the glass came with it, and went with it, at
least as far as concerns us; but, if you need other evidence, you can
consult Renan, who is the highest authority: "One of the most singu-
lar phenomena of the literary history of the Middle Ages," says Renan
of Averroes, "is the activity of the intellectual commerce, and the
rapidity with which books were spread from one end of Europe to the
other. The philosophy of Abelard during his lifetime (1100-42) had
penetrated to the ends of Italy. The French poetry of the trouv^res
counted within less than a century translations into German, Swedish,
Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish, Dutch, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish";
and he might have added that England needed no translation, but
helped to compose the poetry, not being at that time so insular as she
afterwards became. "Such or such a work, composed in Morocco or in
Cairo, was known at Paris and at Cologne in less time than it would
need in our days for a German book of capital importance to pass the
Rhine"; and Renan wrote this in 1852 when German books of capital
importance were revolutionizing the literary world.

One is apt to forget the smallness of Europe, and how quickly it
could always be crossed. In summer weather, with fair winds, one can
sail from Alexandria or from Syria, to Sicily, or even to Spain and
France, in perfect safety and with ample room for freight, as easily
now as one could do it then, without the aid of steam; but one does not
now carry freight of philosophy, poetry, or art. The world still strug-
gles for unity, but by different methods, weapons, and thought. The
mercantile exchanges which surprised Renan, and which have puzzled
historians, were in ideas. The twelfth century was as greedy for them
in one shape as the nineteenth century in another. France paid for

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 141

them dearly, and repented for centuries; but what creates surprise to
the point of incredulity is her hunger for them, the youthful gluttony
with which she devoured them, the infallible taste with which she
dressed them out. The restless appetite that snatched at the pointed
arch, the stone fl^che, the coloured glass, the illuminated missal, the
chanson and roman and pastorelle, the fragments of Aristotle, the
glosses of Avicenne, was nothing compared with the genius which
instantly gave form and flower to them all.

This episode merely means that the French twelfth-century artist
may be supposed to have known his business, and if he produced a
grotesque, or a green-faced Saint, or a blue castle, or a syllogism, or a
song, that he did it with a notion of the effect he had in mind. The
glass window was to him a whole, — a mass, — and its details were his
amusement; for the twelfth-century Frenchman enjoyed his fun,
though it was sometimes rather heavy for modern French taste, and
less refined than the Church liked. These three twelfth-century win-
dows, like their contemporary portal outside, and the fl^che that goes
with them, are the ideals of enthusiasts of mediaeval art; they are
above the level of all known art, in religious form; they are inspired;
they are divine! This is the claim of Chartres and its Virgin. Actually,
the French artist, whether architect, sculptor, or painter in glass,
did rise here above his usual level. He knew it when he did it, and
probably he attributed it, as we do, to the Virgin; for these works
of his were hardly fifty years old when the rest of the old church was
burned ; and already the artist felt the virtue gone out of him. He could
not do so well in 1200 as he did in 11 50; and the Virgin was not so
near.

The proof of it — or, if you prefer to think so, the proof against it — -
is before our eyes on the wall above the lancet windows. When Villard
de Honnecourt came to Chartres, he seized at once on the western rose

as his study, although the two other roses were probably there, in all
their beauty and lightness. He saw in the western rose some quality of

142 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

construction which interested him; and, in fact, the western rose is one
of the flowers of architecture which reveals its beauties slowly without
end; but its chief beauty is the feeling which unites it with the portal,
the lancets, and the fl^che. The glassworker here in the interior had
the same task to perform. The glass of the lancets was fifty years old
when the glass for the rose was planned; perhaps it was seventy, for
the exact dates are unknown, but it does not matter, for the greater the
interval, the more interesting is the treatment. Whatever the date,
the glass of the western rose cannot be much earlier or much later than
that of the other roses, or that of the choir, and yet you see at a glance
that it is quite differently treated. On such matters one must, of
course, submit to the opinion of artists, which one does the more read-
ily because they always disagree; but until the artists tell us better, we
may please ourselves by fancying that the glass of the rose was
intended to harmonize with that of the lancets, and unite it with the
thirteenth-century glass of the nave and transepts. Among all the
thirteenth-century windows the western rose alone seems to affect a
rivalry in brilliancy with the lancets, and carries it so far that the sepa-
rate medallions and pictures are quite lost, — especially in direct
sunshine, — blending in a confused eflfect of opals, in a delirium of
colour and light, with a result like a cluster of stones in jewelry.
Assimiing as one must, in want of the artist's instruction, that he
knew what he wanted to do, and did it, one must take for granted that
he treated the rose as a whole, and aimed at giving it harmony with the
three precious windows beneath. The eflfect is that of a single large
ornament; a round breastpin, or what is now called a sunburst, of
jewels, with three large pendants beneath.

We are ignorant tourists, liable to much error in trying to seek
motives in artists who worked seven hundred years ago for a society
which thought and felt in forms quite unlike ours, but the mediaeval
pilgrim was more ignorant than we, and much simpler in mind ; if the
idea of an ornament occurs to us, it certainly occurred to him, and still

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 143

more to the glassworker whose business was to excite his illusions. An
artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see ; and what
his public will see is what he ought to have intended — the measure of
his genius. If the public sees more than he himself did, this is his
credit; if less, this is his fault. No matter how simple or ignorant we
are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us
to feel it, and when we see a motive, we conclude that other people
have seen it before us, and that it must, therefore, have been intended.
Neither of the transept roses is treated like this one; neither has the
effect of a personal ornament; neither is treated as a jewel. No one
knew so well as the artist that such treatment must give the effect of a
jewel. The Roses of France and of Dreux bear indelibly and flagrantly
the character of France and Dreux; on the western rose is stamped
with greater refinement but equal decision the character of a much
greater power than either of them.

No artist would have ventured to put up, before the eyes of Mary
in Majesty, above the windows so dear to her, any object that she had
not herself commanded. Whether a miracle was necessary, or whether
genius was enough, is a point of casuistry which you can settle with
Albertus Magnus or Saint Bernard, and which you will understand as
little when settled as before; but for us, beyond the futilities of unnec-
essary doubt, the Virgin designed this rose; not perhaps in quite the
same perfect spirit in which she designed the lancets, but still wholly
for her own pleasure and as her own idea. She placed upon the breast
of her Church — which symbolized herself — a jewel so gorgeous that
no earthly majesty could bear comparison with it, and which no other
heavenly majesty has rivalled. As one watches the light play on it, one
is still overcome by the glories of the jewelled rose and its three
gemmed pendants; one feels a little of the effect she meant it to
produce even on infidels. Moors, and heretics, but infinitely more on
the men who feared and the women who adored her; — not to dwell
too long upon it, one admits that hers is the only Church. One

144 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

would admit anything that she should require. If you had only the
soul of a shrimp, you would crawl, like the Abbe Suger, to kiss her
feet.

Unfortunately she is gone, or comes here now so very rarely that we
never shall see her; but her genius remains as individual here as the
genius of Blanche of Castile and Pierre de Dreux in the transepts.
That the three lancets were her own taste, as distinctly as the Trianon
was the taste of Louis XIV, is self-evident. They represent all that
was dearest to her; her Son's glory on her right; her own beautiful
life in the middle; her royal ancestry on her left: the story of her
divine right, thrice-told. The pictures are all personal, like family por-
traits. Above them the man who worked in 1200 to carry out the
harmony, and to satisfy the Virgin's wishes, has filled his rose with a
dozen or two little compositions in glass, which reveal their subjects
only to the best powers of a binocle. Looking carefully, one discovers
at last that this gorgeous combination of all the hues of Paradise con-
tains or hides a Last Judgment — the one subject carefully excluded
from the old work, and probably not existing on the south portal for
another twenty years. If the scheme of the western rose dates from
1200, as is reasonable to suppose, this Last Judgment is the oldest in
the church, and makes a link between the theology of the first crusade,
beneath, and the theology of Pierre Mauclerc in the south porch. The
churchman is the only true and final judge on his own doctrine, and we
neither know nor care to know the facts; but we are as good judges as
he of the feeling, and we are at full liberty to feel that such a Last
Judgment as this was never seen before or since by churchman or here-
tic, unless by virtue of the heresy which held that the true Christian
must be happy in being damned since such is the will of God. That
this blaze of heavenly light was intended, either by the Virgin or by
her workmen, to convey ideas of terror or pain, is a notion which the
Church might possibly preach, but which we sinners knew to be false
in the thirteenth century as well as we know it now. Never in all these

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 145

seven hundred years has one of us looked up at this rose without feel-
ing it to be Our Lady's promise of Paradise.

Here as everywhere else throughout the church, one feels the Vir-
gin's presence, with no other thought than her majesty and grace. To
the Virgin and to her suppliants, as to us, who though outcasts in other
churches can still hope in hers, the Last Judgment was not a symbol
of God's justice or man's corruption, but of her own infinite mercy.
The Trinity judged, through Christ; — Christ loved and pardoned,
through her. She wielded the last and highest power on earth and in
hell. In the glow and beauty of her nature, the light of her Son's
infinite love shone as the sunlight through the glass, turning the Last
Judgment itself into the highest proof of her divine and supreme
authority. The rudest ruffian of the Middle Ages, when he looked at
this Last Judgment, laughed; for what was the Last Judgment to her!
An ornament, a plaything, a pleasure! a jewelled decoration which she
wore on her breast! Her chief joy was to pardon; her eternal instinct
was to love; her deepest passion was pity! On her imperial heart the
flames of hell showed only the opaline colours of heaven. Christ the
Trinity might judge as much as He pleased, but Christ the Mother
would rescue; and her servants could look boldly into the flames.

If you, or even our friends the priests who still serve Mary's
shrine, suspect that there is some exaggeration in this language, it will
only oblige you to admit presently that there is none; but for the mo-
ment we are busy with glass rather than with faith, and there is a world
of glass here still to study. Technically, we are done with it. The
technique of the thirteenth century comes naturally and only too
easily out of that of the twelfth. Artistically, the motive remains the
same, since it is always the Virgin ; but although the Virgin of Chartres
is always the Virgin of Majesty, there are degrees in the assertion of
her majesty even here, which affect the art, and qualify its feeling.
Before stepping down to the thirteenth century, one should look at
these changes of the Virgin's royal presence.

146 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

First and most important as record is the stone Virgin on the south
door of the western portal, which we studied, with her Byzantine
Court ; and the second, also in stone, is of the same period, on one of the
carved capitals of the portal, representing the Adoration of the Magi.
The third is the glass Virgin at the top of the central lancet. All three
are undoubted twelfth-century work; and you can see another at Paris,
on the same door of Notre Dame, and still more on Abb§ Suger's
window at Saint-Denis, and, later, within a beautiful grisaille at
Auxerre; but all represent the same figure; a Queen, enthroned,
crowned, with the symbols of royal power, holding in her lap the infant
King whose guardian she is. Without pretending to know what special
crown she bears, we can assume, till corrected, that it is the Carlovin-
gian imperial, not the Byzantine. The Trinity nowhere appears except
as implied in the Christ. At the utmost, a mystic hand may symbolize
the Father. The Virgin as represented by the artists of the twelfth
century in the tie de France and at Chartres seems to be wholly
French in spite of the Greek atmosphere of her workmanship. One
might almost insist that she is blonde, full in face, large in figure,
dazzlingly beautiful, and not more than thirty years of age. The Child
never seems to be more than five.

You are equally free to see a Southern or Eastern type in her face,
and perhaps the glass suggests a dark type, but the face of the Virgin
on the central lancet is a fourteenth-century restoration which may or
may not reproduce the original, while all the other Virgins represented
in glass, except one, belong to the thirteenth century. The possible
exception is a well-known figure called Notre-Dame-de-la-Belle-
Verri^re in the choir next the south transept. A strange, almost un-
canny feeling seems to haunt this window, heightened by the venera-
tion in which it was long held as a shrine, though it is now deserted for
Notre-Dame-du-Pilier on the opposite side of the choir. The charm is
partly due to the beauty of the scheme of the angels, supporting,
saluting, and incensing the Virgin and Child with singular grace and

THE TWELFTH-CENTURY GLASS 147

exquisite feeling, but rather that of the thirteenth than of the twelfth
century. Here, too, the face of the Virgin is not ancient. Apparently
the original glass was injured by time or accident, and the colours
were covered or renewed by a simple drawing in oil. Elsewhere the
colour is thought to be particularly good, and the window is a favourite
mine of motives for artists to exploit, but to us its chief interest is its
singular depth of feeling. The Empress Mother sits full-face, on a rich
throne and dais, with the Child on her lap, repeating her attitude ex-
cept that her hands support His shoulders. She wears her crown; her
feet rest on a stool, and both stool, rug, robe, and throne are as rich as
colour and decoration can make them. At last a dove appears, with
the rays of the Holy Ghost. Imperial as the Virgin is, it is no longer
quite the unlimited empire of the western lancet. The aureole encircles
her head only; she holds no sceptre; the Holy Ghost seems to give her
support which she did not need before, while Saint Gabriel and Saint
Michael, her archangels, with their symbols of power, have disap-
peared. Exquisite as the angels are who surround and bear up her
throne, they assert no authority. The window itself is not a single
composition ; the panels below seem inserted later merely to fill up the
space; six represent the Marriage of Cana, and the three at the bottom
show a grotesque little demon tempting Christ in the Desert. The
effect of the whole, in this angle which is almost always dark or filled
with shadow, is deep and sad, as though the Empress felt her authority
fail, and had come down from the western portal to reproach us for
neglect. The face is haunting. Perhaps its force may be due to near-
ness, for this is the only instance in glass of her descending so low that
we can almost touch her, and see what the twelfth century instinc-
tively felt in the features which, even in their beatitude, were serious
and almost sad under the austere responsibilities of infinite pity and
power.

No doubt the window is very old, or perhaps an imitation or repro-
duction of one which was much older, but to the pilgrim its interest lies

148 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

mostly in its personality, and there it stands alone. Although the Vir-
gin reappears again and again in the lower windows, — as in those on
either side of the Belle- Verriere; in the remnant of window represent-
ing her miracles at Chartres, in the south aisle next the transept ; in the
fifteenth-century window of the chapel of Vendome which follows; and
in the third window which follows that of Vendome and represents her
coronation, — she does not show herself again in all her majesty till we
look up to the high windows above. There we shall find her in her
splendour on her throne, above the high altar, and still more con-
spicuously in the Rose of France in the north transept. Still again she
is enthroned in the first window of the choir next the north transept.
Elsewhere we can see her standing, but never does she come down to
us in the full splendour of her presence. Yet wherever we find her at
Chartres, and of whatever period, she is always Queen. Her expression
and attitude are always calm and commanding. She never calls for
sympathy by hysterical appeals to our feelings; she does not even alto-
gether command, but rather accepts the voluntary, unquestioning,
unhesitating, instinctive faith, love, and devotion of mankind. She
will accept ours, and we have not the heart to refuse it; we have not
even the right, for we are her guests.

CHAPTER IX

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS

ONE'S first visit to a great cathedral is like one's first visit to the
British Museum; the only intelligent idea is to follow the order
of time, but the museum is a chaos in time, and the cathedral is generally
all of one and the same time. At Chartres, after finishing with the
twelfth century, everything is of the thirteenth. To catch even an order
in time, one must first know what part of the thirteenth-century
church was oldest. The books say it was the choir. After the fire of
1 194, the pilgrims used the great crypt as a church where services were
maintained ; but the builders must have begun with the central piers
and the choir, because the choir was the only essential part of the
church. Nave and transepts might be suppressed, but without a choir
the church was useless, and in a shrine, such as Chartres, the choir was
the whole church. Toward the choir, then, the priest or artist looks
first; and, since dates are useful, the choir must be dated. The same
popular enthusiasm, which had broken out in 1 145, revived in 1195 to
help the rebuilding; and the work was pressed forward with the same
feverish haste, so that ten years should have been ample to provide for
the choir, if for nothing more; and services may have been resumed
there as early as the year 1206; certainly in 12 10. Probably the win-
dows were designed and put in hand as soon as the architect gave the
measurements, and any one who intended to give a window would
have been apt to choose one of the spaces in the apse, in Mary's own
presence, next the sanctuary.

The first of the choir windows to demand a date is the Belle- Verri^re,
which is commonly classed as early thirteenth-century, and may go
with the two windows next it, one of which — the so-called Zodiac
window — bears a singularly interesting inscription : " Comes Teobal-

ISO MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Dus DAT ... AD PRECES COMiTis PxiCENSis." If Shakespeare could
write the tragedy of "King John," we cannot admit ourselves not to
have read it, and this inscription might be a part of the play. The
"pagus perticensis" lies a short drive to the west, some fifteen or
twenty miles on the road to Le Mans, and in history is known as the
Comte du Perche, although its memory is now preserved chiefly by its
famous breed of Percheron horses. Probably the horse also dates from,
the crusades, and may have carried Richard Cceur-de-Lion, but in an)
case the count of that day was a vassal of Richard, and one of his inti-
mate friends, whose memory is preserved forever by a single line in
Richard's prison-song: —

Mes compaignons cui j'amoie et cui j'aim,
Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain.

In 1 194, when Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote these verses, the Comte
du Perche was Geoffroy III, who had been a companion of Richard on
his crusade in 1192, where, according to the Chronicle, "he shewed
himself but a timid man " ; which seems scarcely likely in a companion
of Richard; but it is not of him that the Chartres window speaks,
except as the son of Mahaut or Matilda of Champagne who was a sis-
ter of Alix of Champagne, Queen of France. The Table shows, there-
fore, that Geoflfroi's son and successor as the Comte du Perche -~-
Thomas — was second cousin of Louis the Lion, known as King Louis
VIII of France. They were probably of much the same age.

If this were all, one might carry it in one's head for a while, but the
relationship which dominates the history of this period was that of all
these great ruling families with Richard Coeur-de-Lion and his brother
John, nicknamed Lackland, both of whom in succession were the most
powerful Frenchmen in France. The Table shows that their mother
Eleanor of Guienne, the first Queen of Louis VII, bore him two
daughters, one of whom, Alix, married, about 1 164, the Count Thibaut
of Chartres and Blois, while the other, Mary, married the great Count
of Champagne. Both of them being half-sisters of Coeur-de-Lion and

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 151

John, their children were nephews or half-nephews, indiscriminately,
of all the reigning monarchs, and CcEur-de-Lion immortalized one of
them by a line in his prison-song, as he immortalized Le Perche: —

Je nel di pas de cell de Chartain,
La mere Loeis.

"Loeis," therefore, or Count Louis of Chatres, was not only nephew
of Coeur-de-Lion and John Lackland, but was also, like Count Thomas
of Le Perche, a second cousin of Louis VI I L Feudally and personally
he was directly attached to CcEur-de-Lion rather than to Philip
Augustus.

If society in the twelfth century could follow the effects of these
relationships, personal and feudal, it was cleverer than society in the
twentieth; but so much is simple: Louis of France, Thibaut of Char-
tres, and Thomas of Le Perche, were cousins and close friends in the
year 1215, and all were devoted to the Virgin of Chartres. Judging
from the character of Louis's future queen, Blanche of Castile, their
wives were, if possible, more devoted still; and in that year Blanche
gave birth to Saint Louis, who seems to have been the most devoted
of all.

Meanwhile their favourite uncle, Coeur-de-Lion, had died in the
year 1199. Thibaut's great-grandmother, Eleanor of Guienne, died in
1202. King John, left to himself, rapidly accumulated enemies innu-
merable, abroad and at home. In 1203, Philip Augustus confiscated all
the fiefs he held from the French Crown, and in 1204 seized Normandy.
John sank rapidly from worse to worst, until at last the English barons
rose and forced him to grant their Magna Carta at Runnimede in
1215.

The year 121 5 was, therefore, a year to be remembered at Chartres,
as at Mont-Saint-Michel ; one of the most convenient dates in history.
Every one is supposed, even now, to know what happened then, to
give another violent wrench to society, like the Norman Conquest in
1066. John turned on the barons and broke them down; they sent to

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THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 153

France for help, and offered the crown of England to young Louis,
whose father, Philip Augustus, called a council which pledged support
to Louis. Naturally the Comte du Perche and the Comte de Chartres
must have pledged their support, among the foremost, to go with Louis
to England. He was then twenty-nine years old ; they were probably
somewhat younger.

The Zodiac window, with its inscription, was the immediate result.
The usual authority that figures in the histories is Roger of Wendover,
but much the more amusing for our purpose is a garrulous Frenchman
known as the M^nestrel de Rheims who wrote some fifty years later.
After telling in his delightful thirteenth-century French, how the Eng-
lish barons sent hostages to Louis, "et mes sires Loueys les fit bien
gardeir et honourablement," the Menestrel continued: —

Et assembla granz genz par amours, et par deniers, et par lignage. Et fu avec
lui li cuens dou Perche, et H cuens de Montfort, et li cuens de Chartres, et li cuens
de Monbleart, et mes sires Enjorrans de Couci, et mout d'autre grant seigneur
dont je ne parole mie.

The Comte de Chartres, therefore, may be supposed to have gone
with the Comte du Perche, and to have witnessed the disaster at
Lincoln which took place May 20, 1217, after King John's death: —

Et li cuens dou Perche faisait I'avantgarde, et courut tout leiz des portes; et la
gamisons de laienz issi hors et leur coururent sus ; et i ot asseiz trait et lanci^ ; et
chevaus morz et chevaliers abatuz, et gent k pi6 morz et navreiz. Et H cuens dou
Perche i fu morz par un ribaut qui li leva le pan dou hauberc, et I'ocist d'un coutel;
et fu desconfite 1 'avantgarde par la mort le conte. Et quant mes sires Loueys le
sot, si ot graigneur duel qu'il eust onques, car il estoit ses prochains ami de char.

Such language would be spoiled by translation. For us it is enough
to know that the "ribaut" who lifted the "pan," or skirt, of the
Count's "hauberc" or coat-of-mail, as he sat on his horse refusing to
surrender to English traitors, and stabbed him from below with a knife,
may have been an invention of the Menestrel; or the knight who
pierced with his lance through the visor to the brain, may have been
an invention of Roger of Wendover; but in either case, Count Thomas

154 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

du Perche lost his life at Lincoln, May 20, 12 17, to the deepest
regret of his cousin Louis the Lion as well as of the Count Thibaut of
Chartres, whom he charged to put up a window for him in honour
of the Virgin.

The window must have been ordered at once, because Count Thi-
baut, "le Jeune ou le L6preux," died himself within a year, April 22,
1 2 1 8, thus giving an exact date for one of the choir windows. Probably
it was one of the latest, because the earliest to be provided would have
been certainly those of the central apsidal chapel. According to the
rule laid down by Viollet-le-Duc, the windows in which blue strongly
predominates, like the Saint Sylvester, are likely to be earlier than
those with a prevailing tone of red. We must take for granted that
some of these great legendary windows were in place as early as 1 2 10,
because, in October of that year, Philip Augustus attended mass here.
There are some two dozen of these windows in the choir alone, each of
which may well have represented a year's work in the slow processes of
that day, and we can hardly suppose that the workshops of 1200 were
on a scale such as to allow of more than two to have been in hand at
once. Thirty or forty years later, when the Sainte Chapelle was built,
the workshops must have been vastly enlarged, but with the enlarge-
ment, the glass deteriorated. Therefore, if the architecture were so far
advanced in the year 1200 as to allow of beginning work on the glass,
in the apse, the year 1225 is none too late to allow for its completion in
the choir.

Dates are stupidly annoying; — what we want is not dates but
taste; — yet we are uncomfortable without them. Except the Perche
window, none of the lower ones in the choir helps at all ; but the clere-
story is more useful. There they run in pairs, each pair surmounted
by a rose. The first pair (numbers 27 and 28) next the north transept,
shows the Virgin of France, supported, according to the Abb^s Bulteau
and Clerval, by the arms of Bishop Reynault de Mougon, who was
Bishop of Chartres at the time of the great fire in 1194 and died in

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 155

1217. The window number 28 shows two groups of peasants on pil-
grimage; below, on his knees, Robert of Berou, as donor: " Robertus
DE Berou: Carn. Cancellarius." The Cartulary of the Cathedral
contains an entry (Bulteau, i, 123): "The 26^^ February, 1216, died
Robert de Berou, Chancellor, who has given us a window." The
Cartulary mentions several previous gifts of windows by canons or
other dignitaries of the Church in the year 1215.

Next follow, or once followed, a pair of windows (numbers 29 and 30)
which were removed by the sculptor Bridan, in 1788, in order to obtain
light for his statuary below. The donor was "Domina Johannes
Baptista," who, we are told, was Jeanne de Dammartin; and the win-
dow was given in memory, or in honour, of her marriage to Ferdinand
of Castile in 1237. Jeanne was a very great lady, daughter of the
Comte d'Aumale and Marie de Ponthieu. Her father affianced her in
1235 to the King of England, Henry HI, and even caused the marriage
to be celebrated by proxy, but Queen Blanche broke it off, as she had
forbidden, in 1 231, that of Yolande of Britanny. She relented so far as
to allow Jeanne in 1237 to marry Ferdinand of Castile, who still sits on
horseback in the next rose: "Rex Castillo." He won the crown of
Castile in 121 7 and died in 1 252, when Queen Jeanne returned to
Abbeville and then, at latest, put up this window at Chartres in mem-
ory of her husband.

The windows numbers 31 and 32 are the subject of much dispute,
but whether the donors were Jean de Chatillon or the three children of
Thibaut le Grand of Champagne, they must equally belong to the later
series of 1260-70, rather than to the earlier of 1210-20. The same
thing is or was true of the next pair, numbers 33 and 34, which were
removed in 1773, but the record says that at the bottom of number 34
was the figure of Saint Louis's son, Louis of France, who died in 1260,
before his father, who still rides in the rose above.

Thus the north side of the choir shows a series of windows that
precisely cover the lifetime of Saint Louis (1215-70). The south side

156 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

begins, next the apse, with windows numbers 35 and 36, which belong,
according to the Comte d'Armancourt, to the family of Montfort,
whose ruined castle crowns the hill of Montfort I'Amaury, on the road
to Paris, some forty kilometres northeast of Chartres. Every one is
supposed to know the story of Simon de Montfort who was killed
before Toulouse in 121 8. Simon left two sons, Amaury and Simon.
The sculptor Bridan put an end also to the window of Amaury, but in
the rose, Amaury, according to the Abbes, still rides on a white horse.
Amaury's history is well known. He was made Constable of France
by Queen Blanche in 1231 ; went on crusade in 1239; was captured by
the infidels, taken to Babylon, ransomed, and in returning to France,
died at Otranto in 1241. For that age Amaury was but a commonplace
person, totally overshadowed by his brother Simon, who went to
England, married King John's daughter Eleanor, and became almost
king himself as Earl of Leicester. At your leisure you can read Mat-
thew Paris's dramatic account of him and of his death at the battle of
Evesham, August 5, 1265. He was perhaps the last of the very great
men of the thirteenth century, excepting Saint Louis himself, who
lived a few years longer. M. d'Armancourt insists that it is the great
Earl of Leicester who rides with his visor up, in full armour, on a
brown horse, in the rose above the windows numbers 37 and 38. In
any case, the windows would be later than 1240.

The next pair of windows, numbers 39 and 40, also removed in 1788,
still offer, in their rose, the figure of a member of the Courtenay family.
Gibbon was so much attracted by the romance of the Courtenays as to
make an amusing digression on the subject which does not concern us
or the cathedral except so far as it tells us that the Courtenays, like so
many other benefactors of Chartres Cathedral, belonged to the royal
blood. Louis-le-Gros, who died in 1 137, besides his son Louis-le-Jeune,
who married Eleanor of Guienne in that year, had a younger son,
Pierre, whom he married to Isabel de Courtenay, and who, like Philip
Hurepel, took the title of his wife. Pierre had a son, Pierre II, who

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 157

was a cousin of Philip Augustus, and became the hero of the most lurid
tragedy of the time. Chosen Emperor of Constantinople in 12 16, to
succeed his brothers-in-law Henry and Baldwin, he tried to march
across Illyria and Macedonia, from Durazzo opposite Brindisi, with a
little army of five thousand men, and instantly disappeared forever.
The Epirotes captured him in the summer of 121 7, and from that
moment nothing is known of his fate.

On the whole, this catastrophe was perhaps the grimmest of all the
Shakespearean tragedies of the thirteenth century; and one would like
to think that the Chartres window was a memorial of this Pierre, who
was a cousin of France and an emperor without empire; but M. d'Ar-
mancourt insists that the window was given in memory not of this
Pierre, but of his nephew, another Pierre de Courtenay, Seigneur de
Conches, who went on crusade with Saint Louis in 1249 to Egypt, and
died shortly before the defeat and captivity of the King, on February
8, 1250, His brother Raoul, Seigneur d'llliers, who died in 127 1, is said
to be donor of the next window, number 40. The date of the Courte-
nay windows should therefore be no earlier than the death of Saint
Louis in 1270; yet one would like to know what has become of another
Courtenay window left by the first Pierre's son-in-law, Gaucher or
Gaultier of Bar-sur-Seine, who seems to have been Vicomte de Char-
tres, and who, dying before Damietta in 1218, made a will leaving
to Notre Dame de Chartres thirty silver marks, "de quibus fieri debet
miles montatus super equum suum." Not only would this mounted
knight on horseback supply an early date for these interesting fig-
ures, but would fix also the cost, for a mark contained eight ounces of
silver, and was worth ten sous, or half a livre. We shall presently
see that Aucassins gave twenty sous, or a livre, for a strong ox, so
that the "miles montatus super equum suum" in glass was equi-
valent to fifteen oxen if it were money of Paris, which is far from
cf^rtain.

This is an economical problem which belongs to experts, but the

158 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

historical value of these early evidences is still something, — perhaps
still as much as ten sous. All the windows tend to the same conclusion.
Even the last pair, numbers 41 and 42, offer three personal clues which
lead to the same result: — the arms of Bouchard de Marly who died in
1226, almost at the same time as Louis VIII; a certain Colinus or
Colin, "de camera Regis," who was alive in 1225; and Robert of
Beaumont in the rose, who seems to be a Beaumont of Le Perche, of
whom little or nothing is as yet certainly known. As a general rule,
there are two series of windows, one figuring the companions or fol-
lowers of Louis VIII (1215-26); the other, friends or companions of
Saint Louis (1226-70), Queen Blanche uniting both. What helps to
hold the sequences in a certain order, is that the choir was complete,
and services regularly resumed there, in 12 10, while in 1220 the tran-
sept and nave were finished and vaulted. For the apside windows,
therefore, we will assume, subject to correction, a date from 1200 to
1225 for their design and workmanship; for the transept, 1220 to 1236;
and for the nave a general tendency to the actual reign of Saint Louis
from 1236 to 1270. Since there is a deal of later glass scattered every-
where among the earlier, the margin of error is great; but by keeping
the reign of Louis VIII and its personages distinct from that of Louis
IX and his generation, we can be fairly sure of our main facts. Mean-
while the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, wholly built and completed be-
tween 1240 and 1248, offers a standard of comparison for the legendary
windows.

The choir of Chartres is as long as the nave, and much broader,
besides that the apse was planned with seven circular projections
which greatly increased the window space, so that the guidebook
reckons thirty-seven windows. A number of these are grisailles, and
the true amateur of glass considers the grisailles to be as well worth
study as the legendary windows. They are a decoration which has no
particular concern with churches, and no distinct religious meaning,
but, it seems, a religious value which ViolIet-le-Duc is at some trouble

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 159

to explain; and, since his explanation is not very technical.we can look
at it, before looking at the legends: —

The colouration of the windows had the advantage of throwing on the opaque
walls a veil, or coloured glazing, of extreme delicacy, always assuming that the
coloured windows themselves were harmoniously toned. Whether their resources
did not permit the artists to adopt a complete system of coloured glass, or whether
they wanted to get daylight in purer quality into their interiors, — whatever may
have been their reasons, — they resorted to this beautiful grisaille decoration
which is also a colouring harmony obtained by the aid of a long experience in the
effects of light on translucent surfaces. Many of our churches retain grisaille win-
dows filling either all, or only a part, of their bays. In the latter case, the grisailles
are reserved for the side windows which are meant to be seen obliquely, and in that
case the coloured glass fills the bays of the fond, the apsidal openings which are
meant to be seen in face from a distance. These lateral grisailles are still opaque
enough to prevent the solar rays which pass through them from lighting the
coloured windows on the reverse side; yet, at certain hours of the day, these solar
rays throw a pearly light on the coloured windows which gives them indescribable
transparence and refinement of tones. The lateral windows in the choir of the
Auxerre Cathedral, half-grisaille, half -coloured, throw on the wholly coloured
apsidal window, by this means, a glazing the softness of which one can hardly con-
ceive. The opaline light which comes through these lateral bays, and makes a sort
of veil, transparent in the extreme, under the lofty vaulting, is crossed by the
brilliant tones of the windows behind, which give the play of precious stones. The
solid outlines then seem to waver like objects seen through a sheet of clear water.
Distances change their values, and take depths in which the eye gets lost. With
every hour of the day these effects are altered, and always with new harmonies
which one never tires of trying to understand ; but the deeper one's study goes, the
more astounded one becomes before the experience acquired by these artists, whose
theories on the effects of colour, assuming that they had any, are unknown to us
and whom the most kindly-disposed among us treat as simple children.

You can read the rest for yourselves. Grisaille is a separate branch
of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting
and fen^trage, and will have to remain a closed book because the feel-
ing and experience which explained it once are lost, and we cannot
recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather than
reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the best work of
the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the dog shows in
retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists have lost. All we can

i6o MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

do is to note that the grisailles were intended to have values. They
were among the refinements of light and colour with which the apse of
Chartres is so crowded that one must be content to feel what one can,
and let the rest go.

Understand, we cannot ! nothing proves that the greatest artists who
ever lived have, in a logical sense, understood ! or that omnipotence has
ever understood ! or that the utmost power of expression has ever been
capable of expressing more than the reaction of one energy on another,
but not of two on two ; and when one sits here, in the central axis of
this complicated apse, one sees, in mere light alone, the reaction of
hundreds of energies, although time has left only a wreck of what the
artist put here. One of the best window spaces is wholly filled up by
the fourteenth-century doorway to the chapel of Saint Piat, and only
by looking at the two windows which correspond on the north does a
curious inquirer get a notion of the probable loss. The same chapel
more or less blocks the light of three other principal windows. The
sun, the dust, the acids of dripping water, and the other works of time,
have in seven hundred years corroded or worn away or altered the
glass, especially on the south side. Windows have been darkened by
time and mutilated by wilful injury. Scores of the panels are wholly
restored, modern reproductions or imitations. Even after all this loss,
the glass is probably the best- preserved, or perhaps the only preserved
part of the decoration in colour, for we never shall know the colour-
decoration of the vaults, the walls, the columns, or the floors. Only
one point is fairly sure; — that on festivals, if not at other times, every
foot of space was covered in some way or another, throughout the apse,
with colour; either paint or tapestry or embroidery or Byzantine
brocades and Oriental stuffs or rugs, lining the walls, covering the
altars, and hiding the floor. Occasionally you happen upon illumi-
nated manuscripts showing the interiors of chapels with their colour^
decoration; but everything has perished here except the glass.

If one may judge from the glass of later centuries, the first impres-

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS i6i

sion from the thirteenth-century windows ought to be disappointment.
You should find them too effeminate, too soft, too small, and above all
not particularly religious. Indeed, except for the nominal subjects of
the legends, one sees nothing religious about them; the medallions,
when studied with the binocle, turn out to be less religious than
decorative. Saint Michael would not have felt at home here, and
Saint Bernard would have turned from them with disapproval; but
when they were put up, Saint Bernard was long dead, and Saint Mi-
chael had yielded his place to the Virgin. This apse is all for her. At its
entrance she sat, on either side, in the Belle- Verriere or as Our Lady of
the Pillar, to receive the secrets and the prayers of suppliants who
wished to address her directly in person ; there she bent down to our
level, resumed her humanity, and felt our griefs and passions. Within,
where the cross-lights fell through the wide columned space behind the
high altar, was her withdrawing room, where the decorator and builder
thought only of pleasing her. The very faults of the architecture and
effeminacy of taste witness the artists' object. If the glassworkers had
thought of themselves or of the public or even of the priests, they
would have strained for effects, strong masses of colour, and striking
subjects to impress the imagination. Nothing of the sort is even sug-
gested. The great, awe-inspiring mosaic figure of the Byzantine half-
dome was a splendid religious effect, but this artist had in his mind an
altogether different thought. He was in the Virgin's employ; he was
decorating her own chamber in her own palace; he wanted to please
her; and he knew her tastes, even when she did not give him her per-
sonal orders. To him, a dream would have been an order. The salary
of the twelfth-century artist was out of all relation with the percentage
of a twentieth-century decorator. The artist of 1200 was probably the
last who cared little for the baron, not very much for the priest, and
nothing for the public, unless he happened to be paid by the guild,
and then he cared just to the extent of his hire, or, if he was himself a
priest, not even for that. His pay was mostly of a different kind, and

i62 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

was the same as that of the peasants who were hauling the stone from
the quarry at Berch^res while he was firing his ovens. His reward was
to come when he should be promoted to decorate the Queen of Heav-
en's palace in the New Jerusalem, and he served a mistress who knew
better than he did what work was good and what was bad, and how to
give him his right place. Mary's taste was infallible; her knowledge
like her power had no limits; she knew men's thoughts as well as acts,
and could not be deceived. Probably, even in our own time, an artist
might find his imagination considerably stimulated and his work pow-
erfully improved if he knew that anything short of his best would
bring him to the gallows, with or without trial by jury; but in the
twelfth century the gallows was a trifle; the Queen hardly considered
it a punishment for an offence to her dignity. The artist was vividly
aware that Mary disposed of hell.

All this is written in full, on every stone and window of this apse,
as legible as the legends to any one who cares to read. The artists were
doing their best, not to please a swarm of flat-eared peasants or slow-
witted barons, but to satisfy Mary, the Queen of Heaven, to whom the
Kings and Queens of France were coming constantly for help, and
whose absolute power was almost the only restraint recognized by
Emperor, Pope, and clown. The colour-decoration is hers, and hers
alone. For her the lights are subdued, the tones softened, the subjects
selected, the feminine taste preserved. That other great ladies inter-
ested themselves in the matter, even down to its technical refinements,
is more than likely; indeed, in the central apside chapel, suggesting the
Auxerre grisaille that Viollet-le-Duc mentioned, is a grisaille which
bears the arms of Castile and Queen Blanche; further on, three other
grisailles bear also the famous castles, but this is by no means the
strongest proof of feminine taste. The difficulty would be rather to
find a touch of certainly masculine taste in the whole apse.

Since the central apside chapel is the most important, we can begin
with the windows there, bearing in mind that the subject of the central

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 163

window was the Life of Christ, dictated by rule or custom. On Christ's
left hand is the window of Saint Peter; next him is Saint Paul. All are
much restored ; thirty-three of the medallions are wholly new. Oppo-
site Saint Peter, at Christ's right hand, is the window of Saint Simon
and Saint Jude; and next is the grisaille with the arms of Castile. If
these windows were ordered between 1205 and 12 10, Blanche, who was
born in 1187, and married in 1200, would have been a young princess
of twenty or twenty-five when she gave this window in grisaille to
regulate and harmonize and soften the lighting of the Virgin's boudoir.
The central chapel must be taken to be the most serious, the most
studied, and the oldest of the chapels in the church, above the crypt.
The windows here should rank in importance next to the lancets of the
west front which are only about sixty years earlier. They show fully
that difference.

Here one must see for one's self. Few artists know much about it,
and still fewer care for an art which has been quite dead these four
hundred years. The ruins of Nippur would hardly be more intelligible
to the ordinary architect of English tradition than these twelfth-
century efforts of the builders of Chartres. Even the learning of
Viollet-le-Duc was at fault in dealing with a building so personal as
this, the history of which is almost wholly lost. This central chapel
must have been meant to give tone to the apse, and it shows with the
colour-decoration of a queen's salon, a subject-decoration too serious
for the amusement of heretics. One sees at a glance that the subject-
decoration was inspired by church-custom, while colour was an experi-
ment and the decorators of this enormous window space were at lib-
erty as colourists to please the Countess of Chartres and the Princess
Blanche and the Duchess of Brittany, without much regarding the
opinions of the late Bernard of Clairvaux or even Augustine of Hippo,
since the great ladies of the Court knew better than the Saints what
would suit the Virgin.

The subject of the central window was prescribed by tradition.

i64 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Christ is the Church, and in this church he and his Mother are one;
therefore the life of Christ is the subject of the central window, but
the treatment is the Virgin's, as the colours show, and as the absence
of every influence but hers, including the Crucifixion, proves officially.
Saint Peter and Saint Paul are in their proper place as the two great
ministers of the throne who represent the two great parties in western
religion, the Jewish and the Gentile. Opposite them, balancing by their
family influence the weight of delegated power, are two of Mary's
nephews, Simon and Jude; but this subject branches off again into
matters so personal to Mary that Simon and Jude require closer
acquaintance. One must study a new guidebook — the "Golden
Legend," by the blessed James, Bishop of Genoa and member of the
order of Dominic, who was born at Varazze or Voragio in almost the
same year that Thomas was born at Aquino, and whose "Legends
Aurea," written about the middle of the thirteenth century, was more
popular history than the Bible itself, and more generally consulted as
authority. The decorators of the thirteenth century got their motives
quite outside the Bible, in sources that James of Genoa compiled into
a volume almost as fascinating as the "Fioretti of Saint Francis."

According to the "Golden Legend" and the tradition accepted in
Jerusalem by pilgrims and crusaders, Mary's family connection was
large. It appears that her mother Anne was three times married, and
by each husband had a daughter Mary, so that there were three
Marys, half-sisters.

Joachim — Anne — Cleophas — Salome

Joseph — Mary Alpheus — Mary Mary — Zebedee

I. , 1 r^"^ — I r^ 1

Chnst James Joseph Simon Jude James John

the Minor the the Major the Evangelist

Apostle Just St. lago of Composteila

Simon and Jude were, therefore, nephews of Mary and cousins of
Christ, whose lives were evidence of the truth not merely of Scripture,

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 165

but specially of the private and family distinction of their aunt, the
Virgin Mother of Christ. They were selected, rather than their broth-
ers, or cousins James and John, for the conspicuous honour of standing
opposite Peter and Paul, doubtless by reason of some merit of their
own, but perhaps also because in art the two counted as one, and
therefore the one window offered two witnesses, which allowed the
artist to insert a grisaille in place of another legendary window
to complete the chapel on their right. According to Viollet-le-Duc,
the grisaille in this position regulates the light and so completes the
effect.

If custom prescribed a general rule for the central chapel, it seems
to have left great freedom in the windows near by. At Chartres the
curved projection that contains the next two windows was not a
chapel, but only a window-bay, for the sake of the windows, and, if the
artists aimed at pleasing the Virgin, they would put their best work
there. At Bourges in the same relative place are three of the best win-
dows in the building: — the Prodigal Son, the New Alliance and the
Good Samaritan; all of them full of life, story, and colour, with little
reference to a worship or a saint. At Chartres the choice is still more
striking, and the windows are also the best in the building, after the
twelfth-century glass of the west front. The first, which comes next to
Blanche's grisaille in the central chapel, is given to another nephew of
Mary and apostle of Christ, Saint James the Major, whose life is
recorded in the proper Bible Dictionaries, with a terminal remark as
follows : —

For legends respecting his death and his connections with Spain, see the Roman
Breviary, in which the healing of a paralytic and the conversion of Hermogenes are
attributed to him, and where it is asserted that he preached the Gospel in Spain,
and that his remains were translated to Compostella. ... As there is no shadow of
foundation for any of the legends here referred to, we pass them by without further
notice. Even Baronius shows himself ashamed of them. . . .

If the learned Baronius thought himself required to show shame for
all the legends that pass as history, he must have suffered cruelly dur-

166 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

ing his laborious life, and his sufferings would not have been confined
to the annals of the Church ; but the historical accuracy of the glass
windows is not our affair, nor are historians especially concerned in the
events of the Virgin's life, whether recorded or legendary. Religion is,
or ought to be, a feeling, and the thirteenth-century windows are origi-
nal documents, much more historical than any recorded in the Bible,
since their inspiration is a different thing from their authority. The
true life of Saint James or Saint Jude or any other of the apostles, did
not, in the opinion of the ladies in the Court of France, furnish sub-
jects agreeable enough to decorate the palace of the Queen of Heaven;
and that they were right, any one must feel, who compares these two
windows with subjects of dogma. Saint James, better known as Sant-
iago of Compostella, was a compliment to the young Dauphine —
before Dauphines existed — the Princess Blanche of Castile, whose
arms, or castles, are on the grisaille window next to it. Perhaps she
chose him to stand there. Certainly her hand is seen plainly enough
throughout the church to warrant suspecting it here. As a nephew,
Saint James was dear to the Virgin, but, as a friend to Spain, still more
dear to Blanche, and it is not likely that pure accident caused three
adjacent windows to take a Spanish tone.

The Saint James in whom the thirteenth century delighted, and
whose windows one sees at Bourges, Tours, and wherever the scallop-
shell tells of the pilgrim, belongs not to the Bible but to the "Golden
Legend." This window was given by the Merchant Tailors whose sig-
nature appears at the bottom, in the corners, in two pictures that paint
the tailor's shop of Chartres in the first quarter of the thirteenth cen-
tury. The shop-boy takes cloth from chests for his master to show to
customers, and to measure off by his ell. The story of Saint James
begins in the lower panel, where he receives his mission from Christ.
Above, on the right, he seems to be preaching. On the left appears
a figure which tells the reason for the popularity of the story. It is
Almogenes, or in the Latin, Hermogenes, a famous magician in great

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 167

credit among the Pharisees, who has the command of demons, as you
see, for behind his shoulder, standing, a little demon is perched, while
he orders his pupil Filetus to convert James. Next, James is shown
in discussion with a group of listeners. Filetus gives him a volume
of false doctrine. Almogenes then further instructs Filetus. James is
led away by a rope, curing a paralytic as he goes. He sends his cloak
to Filetus to drive away the demon. Filetus receives the cloak, and
the droll little demon departs in tears. AJmogenes, losing his temper,
sends two demons, with horns on their heads and clubs in their hands,
to reason with James; who sends them back to remonstrate with Almo-
genes. The demons then bind Almogenes and bring him before James,
who discusses differences with him until Almogenes burns his books
of magic and prostrates himself before the Saint. Both are then
brought before Herod, and Almogenes breaks a pretty heathen idol,
while James goes to prison. A panel comes in here, out of place, show-
ing Almogenes enchanting Filetus, and the demon entering into pos-
session of him. Then Almogenes is seen being very roughly handled by
a young Jew, while the bystanders seem to approve. James next
makes Almogenes throw his books of magic into the sea; both are led
away to execution, curing the infirm on their way; their heads are cut
off; and, at the top, God blesses the orb of the world.

That this window was intended to amuse the Virgin seems quite as
reasonable an idea as that it should have been made to instruct the
people, or us. Its humour was as humorous then as now, for the
French of the thirteenth century loved humour even in churches, as
their grotesques proclaim. The Saint James window is a tale of magic,
told with the vivacity of a fabliau; but if its motive of amusement
seems still a forced idea, we can pass on, at once, to the companion
window which holds the best position in the church, where, in the
usual cathedral, one expects to find Saint John or some other apostle;
or Saint Joseph; or a doctrinal lesson such as that called the New
Alliance where the Old and New Testaments are united. The window

168 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

which the artists have set up here is regarded as the best of the
thirteenth-century windows, and is the least religious.

The subject is nothing less than the "Chanson de Roland" in pictures
of coloured glass, set in a border worth comparing at leisure with the
twelfth-century borders of the western lancets. Even at Chartres, the
artists could not risk displeasing the Virgin and the Church by follow-
ing a wholly profane work like the "Chanson" itself, and Roland had
no place in religion. He could be introduced only through Charle-
magne, who had almost as little right there as he. The twelfth century
had made persistent efforts to get Charlemagne into the Church, and
the Church had made very little effort to keep him out; yet by the year
1200, Charlemagne had not been sainted except by the anti-Pope
Pascal III in 1165, although there was a popular belief, supported in
Spain by the necessary documents, that Pope Calixtus II in 11 22 had
declared the so-called Chronicle of Archbishop Turpin to be authentic.
The Bishop of Chartres in 1200 was very much too enlightened a pre-
late to accept the Chronicle or Turpin or Charlemagne himself, still
less Roland and Thierry, as authentic in sanctity; but if the young and
beautiful Dauphine of France, and her cousins of Chartres, and their
artists, warmly believed that the Virgin would be pleased by the story
of Charlemagne and Roland, the Bishop might have let them have
their way in spite of the irregularity. That the window was an irregu-
larity, is plain; that it has always been immensely admired, is certain;
and that Bishop Renaud must have given his assent to it, is not to be
denied.

The most elaborate account of this window can be found in Mile's
"Art Religieux" (pp. 444-50). Its feeling or motive is quite another
matter, as it is with the statuary on the north porch. The Furriers or
Fur Merchants paid for the Charlemagne window, and their signature
stands at the bottom, where a merchant shows a fur-lined cloak to his
customer. That Mary was personally interested in furs, no authority
seems to affirm, but that Blanche and Isabel and every lady of the

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 169

Court, as well as every king and every count, in that day, took keen
interest in the subject, is proved by the prices they paid, and the quan-
tities they wore. Not even the Merchant Tailors had a better standing
at Court than the Furriers, which may account for their standing so
near the Virgin. Whatever the cause, the Furriers were allowed to put
their signature here, side by side with the Tailors, and next to the
Princess Blanche. Their gift warranted it. Above the signature, in the
first panel, the Emperor Constantine is seen, asleep, in Constantinople,
on an elaborate bed, while an angel is giving him the order to seek aid
from Charlemagne against the Saracens. Charlemagne appears, in full
armour of the year 1200, on horseback. Then Charlemagne, sainted,
wearing his halo, converses with two bishops on the subject of a cru-
sade for the rescue of Constantine. In the next scene, he arrives at
the gates of Constantinople where Constantine receives him. The fifth
picture is most interesting; Charlemagne has advanced with his
knights and attacks the Saracens; the Franks wear coats-of-mail, and
carry long, pointed shields; the infidels carry round shields; Charle-
magne, wearing a crown, strikes off with one blow of his sword the
head of a Saracen emir; but the battle is desperate; the chargers are at
full gallop, and a Saracen is striking at Charlemagne with his battle-
axe. After the victory has been won, the Emperor Constantine
rewards Charlemagne by the priceless gift of three chasses or reli-
quaries, containing a piece of the true Cross; the Suaire or grave-cloth
of the Saviour; and a tunic of the Virgin. Charlemagne then returns to
France, and in the next medallion presents the three chasses and the
crown of the Saracen king to the church at Aix, which to a French
audience meant the Abbey of Saint-Denis. This scene closes the first
volume of the story.

The second part opens on Charlemagne, seated between two per-
sons, looking up to heaven at the Milky Way, called then the Way of
Saint James, which directs him to the grave of Saint James in Spain.
Saint James himself appeal's to Charlemagne in a dream, and orders

170 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

him to redeem the tomb from the infidels. Then Charlemagne sets out,
with Archbishop Turpin of Rheims and knights. In presence of his
army he dismounts and implores the aid of God. Then he arrives
before Pampeluna and transfixes with his lance the Saracen chief as he
flies into the city. Mounted, he directs workmen to construct a church
in honour of Saint James; a little cloud figures the hand of God.
Next is shown the miracle of the lances; stuck in the ground at night,
they are found in the morning to have burst into foliage, prefiguring
martyrdom. Two thousand people perish in battle. Then begins the
story of Roland which the artists and donors are so eager to tell, know-
ing, as they do, that what has so deeply interested men and women on
earth, must interest Mary who loves them. You see Archbishop Tur-
pin celebrating mass when an angel appears, to warn him of Roland's
fate. Then Roland himself, also wearing a halo, is introduced, in the
act of killing the giant Ferragus. The combat of Roland and Ferragus
is at the top, out of sequence, as often happens in the legendary win-
dows. Charlemagne and his army are seen marching homeward
through the Pyrenees, while Roland winds his horn and splits the rock
without being able to break Durendal. Thierry, likewise sainted,
brings water to Roland in a helmet. At last Thierry announces
Roland's death. At the top, on either side of Roland and Ferragus, is
an angel with incense.

The execution of this window is said to be superb. Of the colour,
and its relations with that of the Saint James, one needs time and long
acquaintance to learn the value. In the feeling, compared with that of
the twelfth century, one needs no time in order to see a change. These
two windows are as French and as modern as a picture of Lancret; they
are pure art, as simply decorative as the decorations of the Grand
Opera. The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decora-
tion than the twentieth century will ever learn. The windows were
neither symbolic nor mystical, nor more religious than they pre-
tended to be. That they are more intelligent or more costly or more

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 171

eflfective is nothing to the purpose, so long as one grants that the com-
bat of Roland and Ferragus, or Roland winding his olifant, or Charle-
magne cutting off heads and transfixing Moors, were subjects never
intended to teach religion or instruct the ignorant, but to please the
Queen of Heaven as they pleased the queens of earth with a roman, not
in verse but in colour, as near as possible to decorative perfection.
Instinctively one looks to the corresponding bay, opposite, to see what
the artists could have done to balance these two great efforts of their
art; but the bay opposite is now occupied by the entrance to Saint
Piat's chapel and one does not know what changes may have been
made in the fourteenth century to rearrange the glass; yet, even as it
now stands, the Sylvester window which corresponds to the Charle-
magne is, as glass, the strongest in the whole cathedral. In the next
chapel, on our left, come the martyrs, with Saint Stephen, the first
martyr, in the middle window. Naturally the subject is more serious,
but the colour is not differently treated. A step further, and you see
the artists returning to their lighter subjects. The stories of Saint
Julian and Saint Thomas are more amusing than the plots of half
the thirteenth-century romances, and not very much more religious.
The subject of Saint Thomas is a pendant to that of Saint James, for
Saint Thomas was a great traveller and an architect, who carried
Mary's worship to India as Saint James carried it to Spain. Here is
the amusement of many days in studying the stories, the colour and
the execution of these windows, with the help of the " Monographs " of
Chartres and Bourges or the "Golden Legend" and occasional visits
to Le Mans, Tours, Clermont Ferrand, and other cathedrals; but, in
passing, one has to note that the window of Saint Thomas was given
by France, and bears the royal arms, perhaps for Philip Augustus the
King; while the window of Saint Julian was given by the Carpenters
and Coopers. One feels no need to explain how it happens that the
taste of the royal family, and of their tailors, furriers, carpenters, and
coopers, should fit so marvellously, one with another, and with that of

172 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

the Virgin; but one can compare with theirs the taste of the Stone-
workers opposite, in the window of Saint Sylvester and Saint Melchi-
ades, whose blues almost kill the Charlemagne itself, and of the Tan-
ners in that of Saint Thomas of Canterbury; or, in the last chapel on
the south side, with that of the Shoemakers in the window to Saint
Martin, attributed for some reason to a certain Clemens vitrearius
Carnutensis, whose name is on a window in the cathedral of Rouen.
The name tells nothing, even if the identity could be proved. Clement
the glassmaker may have worked on his own account, or for others;
the glass differs only in refinements of taste or perhaps of cost. Nicolas
Lescine, the canon, or Geoffroi Chardonnel, may have been less rich
than the Bakers, and even the Furriers may have not had the revenues
of the King; but some controlling hand has given more or less identical
taste to all.

What one can least explain is the reason why some windows, that
should be here, are elsewhere. In most churches, one finds in the choir
a window of doctrine, such as the so-called New Alliance, but here the
New Alliance is banished to the nave. Besides the costly Charlemagne
and Saint James windows in the apse, the Furriers and Drapers gave
several others, and one of these seems particularly suited to serve as
companion to Saint Thomas, Saint James, and Saint Julian, so that it
is best taken with these while comparing them. It is in the nave, the
third window from the new tower, in the north aisle, — the window of
Saint Eustace. The story and treatment and beauty of the work would
have warranted making it a pendant to Almogenes, in the bay now
serving as the door to Saint Fiat's chapel, which should have been the
most effective of all the positions in the church for a legendary story.
Saint Eustace, whose name was Placidas, commanded the guards of
the Emperor Trajan. One day he went out hunting with huntsmen
and hounds, as the legend in the lower panel of the window begins; a
pretty picture of a stag hunt about the year 1200; followed by one still
prettier, where the stag, after leaping upon a rock, has turned, and

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 173

shows a crucifix between his horns, the stag on one side balancing the
horse on the other, while Placidas on his knees yields to the miracle of
Christ. Then Placidas is baptized as Eustace; and in the centre, you
see him with his wife and two children — another charming composi-
tion — leaving the city. Four small panels in the corners are said to
contain the signatures of the Drapers and Furriers. Above, the story
of adventure goes on, showing Eustace bargaining with a shipmaster
for his passage; his embarcation with wife and children, and their
arrival at some shore, where the two children have landed, and the
master drives Eustace after them while he detains the wife. Four small
panels here have not been identified, but the legend was no doubt
familiar to the Middle Ages, and they knew how Eustace and the
children came to a river, where you can see a pink lion carrying off
one child, while a wolf, which has seized the other, is attacked by
shepherds and dogs. The children are rescued, and the wife reappears,
on her knees before her lord, telling of her escape from the shipmas-
ter, while the children stand behind; and then the reunited family,
restored to the Emperor's favour, is seen feasting and happy. At last
Eustace refuses to offer a sacrifice to a graceful antique idol, and is
then shut up, with all his family, in a brazen bull; a fire is kindled
beneath it; and, from above, a hand confers the crown of martyrdom.
Another subject, which should have been placed in the apse, stands
in a singular isolation which has struck many of the students in this
branch of church learning. At Sens, Saint Eustace is in the choir, and
by his side is the Prodigal Son. At Bourges also the Prodigal Son is
in the choir. At Chartres, he is banished to the north transept, where
you will find him in the window next the nave, almost as though he
were in disgrace; yet the glass is said to be very fine, among the best
in the church, while the story is told with rather more vivacity than
usual ; and as far as colour and execution go, the window has an air of
age and quality higher than the average. At the bottom you see the
signature of the corporation of Butchers. The window at Bourges was

174 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

given by the Tanners. The story begins with the picture showing the
younger son asking the father for his share of the inheritance, which he
receives in the next panel, and proceeds, on horseback, to spend, as one
cannot help suspecting, at Paris, in the Latin Quarter, where he is seen
arriving, welcomed by two ladies. No one has offered to explain why
Chartres should consider two ladies theologically more correct than
one; or why Sens should fix on three, or why Bourges should require
six. Perhaps this was left to the artist's fancy; but, before quitting the
twelfth century, we shall see that the usual young man who took his
share of patrimony and went up to study in the Latin Quarter, found
two schools of scholastic teaching, one called Realism, the other
Nominalism, each of which in turn the Church had been obliged to
condemn. Meanwhile the Prodigal Son is seen feasting with them, and
is crowned with flowers, like a new Abelard, singing his songs to
Heloise, until his religious capital is exhausted, and he is dragged out
of bed, to be driven naked from the house with sticks, in this also
resembling Abelard. At Bourges he is gently turned out; at Sens he is
dragged away by three devils. Then he seeks service, and is seen
knocking acorns from boughs, to feed his employer's swine; but,
among the thousands of young men who must have come here directly
from the schools, nine in every ten said that he was teaching letters
to his employer's children or lecturing to the students of the Latin
Quarter. At last he decides to return to his father, — possibly the
Archbishop of Paris or the Abbot of Saint-Denis, — who receives him
with open arms, and gives him a new robe, which to the ribald student
would mean a church living — an abbey, perhaps Saint Gildas-de-
Rhuys in Brittany, or elsewhere. The fatted calf is killed, the feast is
begun, and the elder son, whom the malicious student would name Ber-
nard, appears in order to make protest. Above, God, on His throne,
blesses the globe of the world.

The original symbol of the Prodigal Son was a rather different form
of prodigality. According to the Church interpretation, the Father

CHARTRES: THE PRODIGAL SON WINDOW

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 175

had two sons; the older was the people of the Jews; the younger, the
Gentiles. The Father divided his substance between them, giving to
the older the divine law, to the younger, the law of nature. The
younger went off and dissipated his substance, as one must believe, on
Aristotle; but repented and returned when the Father sacrificed the
victim — Christ — as the symbol of reunion. That the Synagogue
also accepts the sacrifice is not so clear; but the Church clung to the
idea of converting the Synagogue as a necessary proof of Christ's
divine character. Not until about the time when this window
may have been made, did the new Church, under the influence of
Saint Dominic, abandon the Jews and turn in despair to the Gentiles
alone.

The old symbolism belonged to the fourth and fifth centuries, and,
as told by the Jesuit fathers Martin and Cahier in their " Monograph "
of Bourges, it should have pleased the Virgin who was particularly
loved by the young, and habitually showed her attachment to them.
At Bourges the window stands next the central chapel of the apse,
where at Chartres is the entrance to Saint Fiat's chapel; but Bourges
did not belong to Notre Dame, nor did Sens. The story of the prodigal
sons of these years from 1200 to 1230 lends the window a little personal
interest that the Prodigal Son of Saint Luke's Gospel could hardly
have had even to thirteenth-century penitents. Neither the Church
nor the Crown loved prodigal sons. So far from killing fatted calves
for them, the bishops in 1209 burned no less than ten in Paris for too
great intimacy with Arab and Jew disciples of Aristotle. The position
of the Bishop of Chartres between the schools had been always awk-
ward. As for Blanche of Castile, her first son, afterwards Saint Louis,
was born in 12 15; and after that time no Prodigal Son was likely to be
welcomed in any society which she frequented. For her, above all other
women on earth or in heaven, prodigal sons felt most antipathy, until,
in 1229, the quarrel became so violent that she turned her police on
them and beat a number to death in the streets. They retaliated with-

176 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

out regard for loyalty or decency, being far from model youth and
prone to relapses from virtue, even when forgiven and beneficed.

The Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, showed no prejudice against
prodigal sons, or even prodigal daughters. She would hardly, of her own
accord, have ordered such persons out of her apse, when Saint Stephen
at Bourges and Sens showed no such puritanism; yet the Chartres
window is put away in the north transept. Even there it still stands
opposite the Virgin of the Pillar, on the women's and Queen Blanche's
eide of the church, and in an excellent position, better seen from the
choir than some of the windows in the choir itself, because the late
summer sun shines full upon it, and carries its colours far into the apse.
This may have been one of the many instances of tastes in the Virgin
which were almost too imperial for her official court. Omniscient as
Mary was, she knew no difference between the Blanches of Castile and
the students of the Latin Quarter. She was rather fond of prodigals,
and gentle toward the ladies who consumed the prodigal's substance.
She admitted Mary Magdalen and Mary the Gipsy to her society. She
fretted little about Aristotle so long as the prodigal adored her, and
naturally the prodigal adored her almost to the exclusion of the Trin-
ity. She always cared less for her dignity than was to be wished.
Especially in the nave and on the porch, among the peasants, she liked
to appear as one of themselves; she insisted on lying in bed, in a stable,
with the cows and asses about her, and her baby in a cradle by the bed-
side, as though she had suffered like other women, though the Church
insisted she had not. Her husband, Saint Joseph, was notoriously
uncomfortable in her Court, and always preferred to get as near to the
door as he could. The choir at Chartres, on the contrary, was aristo-
cratic; every window there had a court quality, even down to the con-
temporary Thomas A'Becket, the fashionable martyr of good society.
Theology was put into the transepts or still further away in the nave
where the window of the New Alliance elbows the Prodigal Son. Even
to Blanche of Castile, Mary was neither a philanthropist nor theologist

THE LEGENDARY WINDOWS 177

nor merely a mother, — she was an absolute Empress, and whatever
she said was obeyed, but sometimes she seems to have willed an order
that worried some of her most powerful servants.

Mary chose to put her Prodigal into the transept, and one would
like to know the reason. Was it a concession to the Bishop or the
Queen? Or was it to please the common people that these familiar
picture-books, with their popular interest, like the Good Samaritan
and the Prodigal Son, were put on the walls of the great public hall?
This can hardly be, since the people would surely have preferred the
Charlemagne and Saint James to any other. We shall never know; but
sitting here in the subdued afternoon light of the apse, one goes on for
hours reading the open volumes of colour, and listening to the steady
discussion by the architects, artists, priests, princes, and princesses of
the thirteenth century about the arrangements of this apse. However
strong-willed they might be, each in turn whether priest, or noble, or
glassworker, would have certainly appealed to the Virgin and one can
imagine the architect still beside us, in the growing dusk of evening,
mentally praying, as he looked at the work of a finished day: "Lady
Virgin, show me what you like best! The central chapel is correct, I
know. The Lady Blanche's grisaille veils the rather strong blue tone
nicely, and I am confident it will suit you. The Charlemagne window
seems to me very successful, but the Bishop feels not at all easy about
it, and I should never have dared put it here if the Lady Blanche had
not insisted on a Spanish bay. To balance at once both the subjects
and the colour, we have tried the Stephen window in the next chapel,
with more red ; but if Saint Stephen is not good enough to satisfy you,
we have tried again with Saint Julian, whose story is really worth
telling you as we tell it; and with him we have put Saint Thomas
because you loved him and gave him your girdle. I do not myself care
so very much for Saint Thomas of Canterbury opposite, though the
Count is wild about it, and the Bishop wants it; but the Sylvester is
stupendous in the morning sun. What troubles me most is the first

178 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

right-hand bay. The princesses would not have let me put the Prodi-
gal Son there, even if it were made for the place. I 've nothing else
good enough to balance the Charlemagne unless it be the Eustace.
Gracious Lady, what ought I to do? Forgive me my blunders, my
stupidity, my wretched want of taste and feeling! I love and adore
you! All that I am, I am for you! If I cannot please you, I care not
for Heaven! but without your help, I am lost!"

Upon my word, you may sit here forever imagining such appeals,
and the endless discussions and criticisms that were heard every day,
under these vaults, seven hundred years ago. That the Virgin answered
the questions is my firm belief, just as it is my conviction that she did
not answer them elsewhere. One sees her personal presence on every
side. Any one can feel it who will only consent to feel like a child.
Sitting here any Sunday afternoon, while the voices of the children of
the maitrise are chanting in the choir, — your mind held in the grasp
of the strong lines and shadows of the architecture; your eyes flooded
with the autumn tones of the glass; your ears drowned with the pur-
ity of the voices;one sense reacting uponanotheruntil sensation reaches
the limit of its range, — you, or any other lost soul, could, if you cared
to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal a
sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible, and
would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depths of feeling
which she shows here, — in lines, vaults, chapels, colours, legends,
chants, — more eloquent than the prayer-book, and more beautiful
than the autumn sunlight ; and any one willing to try could feel it like
the child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied
a hundred times; but what is still more convincing, he could, at will,
in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive
of his own.

CHAPTER X

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN

ALL artists love the sanctuary of the Christian Church, and all
tourists love the rest. The reason becomes clear as one leaves the
choir, and goes back to the broad, open hall of the nave. The choir was
made not for the pilgrim but for the deity, and is as old as Adam, or
perhaps older; at all events old enough to have existed in complete
artistic and theological form, with the whole mystery of the Trinity,
the Mother and Child, and even the Cross, thousands of years before
Christ was born ; but the Christian Church not only took the sanctuary
in hand, and gave it a new form, more beautiful and much more re-
fined than the Romans or Greeks or Egyptians had ever imagined, but
it also added the idea of the nave and transepts, and developed it into
imperial splendour. The pilgrim-tourist feels at home in the nave be-
cause it was built for him; the artist loves the sanctuary because he
built it for God.

Chartres was intended to hold ten thousand people easily, or fifteen
thousand when crowded, and the decoration of this great space, though
not a wholly new problem, had to be treated in a new way. Sancta
Sofia was built by the Emperor Justinian, with all the resources of the
Empire, in a single violent effort, in six years, and was decorated
throughout with mosaics on a general scheme, with the unity that Em-
pire and Church could give, when they acted together. The Norman
Kings of Sicily, the richest princes of the twelfth century, were able
to carry out a complete work of the most costly kind, in a single
sustained effort from beginning to end, according to a given plan.
Chartres was a local shrine, in an agricultural province, not even a part
of the royal domain, and its cathedral was the work of society, without
much more tie than the Virgin gave it. Socially Chartres. as far as its

i8o MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

stone- work goes, seems to have been mostly rural ; its decoration, m
the porches and transepts, is royal and feudal ; in the nave and choir it
is chiefly bourgeois. The want of unity is much less surprising than the
unity, but it is still evident, especially in the glass. The mosaics of Mon-
reale begin and end; they are a series; their connection is artistic and
theological at once; they have unity. The windows of Chartres have no
sequence, and their charm is in variety, in individuality, and sometimes
even in downright hostility to each other, reflecting the picturesque
society that gave them. They have, too, the charm that the world has
made no attempt to popularize them for its modern uses, so that,
except for the useful little guide-book of the Abbe Clerval, one can see
no clue to the legendary chaos; one has it to one's self, without much
fear of being trampled upon by critics or Jew dealers in works of art;
any Chartres beggar-woman can still pass a summer's day here, and
never once be mortified by ignorance of things that every dealer in
bric-^-brac is supposed to know.

Yet the artists seem to have begun even here with some idea of
sequence, for the first window in the north aisle, next the new tower,
tells the story of Noah; but the next plunges into the local history
of Chartres, and is devoted to Saint Lubin, a bishop of this diocese
who died in or about the year 556, and was, for some reason, selected
by the Wine-Merchants to represent them, as their interesting me-
dallions show. Then follow three amusing subjects, charmingly treated :
Saint Eustace, whose story has been told; Joseph and his brethren; and
Saint Nicholas, the most popular saint of the thirteenth century, both
in the Greek and in the Roman Churches. The sixth and last window
on the north aisle of the nave is the New Alliance.

Opposite these, in the south aisle, the series begins next the tower
with John the Evangelist, followed by Saint Mary Magdalen, given
by the Water-Carriers. The third, the Good Samaritan, given by the
Shoemakers, has a rival at Sens which critics think even better. The
fourth is the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin. Then

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN i8i

comes the fifteenth-century Chapel of Venddme, to compare the
early and later glass. The sixth is, or was, devoted to the Virgin's
Miracles at Chartres; but only one complete subject remains.

These windows light the two aisles of the nave and decorate the
lower walls of the church with a mass of colour and variety of line still
practically intact in spite of much injury; but the windows of the tran-
septs on the same level have almost disappeared, except the Prodigal
Son and a border to what was once a Saint Lawrence, on the north;
and, on the south, part of a window to Saint Apollinaris of Ravenna,
with an interesting hierarchy of angels above: — seraphim and cheru-
bim with six wings, red and blue; Dominations; Powers; Principalities;
all, except Thrones.

All this seems to be simple enough, at least to the people for whom
the nave was built, and to whom the windows were meant to speak.
There is nothing esoteric here; nothing but what might have suited
the great hall of a great palace. There is no difference in taste between
the Virgin in the choir, and the Water-Carriers by the doorway.
Blanche, the young Queen, liked the same colours, legends, and lines
that her Grocers and Bakers liked. All equally loved the Virgin. There
was not even a social difference. In the choir, Thibaut, the Count of
Chartres, immediate lord of the province, let himself be put in a dark
corner next the Belle Verri^re, and left the Bakers to display their
wealth in the most serious spot in the church, the central window of the
central chapel, while in the nave and transepts all the lower windows
that bear signatures were given by trades, as though that part of
the church were abandoned to the commons. One might suppose that
the feudal aristocracy would have fortified itself in the clerestory and
upper windows, but even there the bourgeoisie invaded them, and you
can see, with a glass, the Pastrycooks and Turners looking across at
the Weavers and Curriers and Money-Changers, and the "Men of
Tours." Beneath the throne of the Mother of God, there was no dis-
tinction of gifts; and above it the distinction favoured the common-

i82 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

alty. Of the seven immense windows above and around the high
altar, which are designed as one composition, none was given by a
prince or a noble. The Drapers, the Butchers, the Bakers, the Bankers
are charged with the highest duties attached to the Virgin's service.
Apparently neither Saint Louis, nor his father Louis VIII, nor his
mother Blanche, nor his uncle Philippe Hurepel, nor his cousin Saint
Ferdinand of Castile, nor his other cousin Pierre de Dreux, nor the
Duchess Alix of Brittany, cared whether their portraits or armorial
shields were thrust out of sight into corners by Pastrycooks and
Teamsters, or took a whole wall of the church to themselves. The
only relation that connects them is their common relation to the
Virgin, but that is emphatic, and dominates the whole.

It dominates us, too, if we reflect on it, even after seven hundred
years that its meaning has faded. When one looks up to this display
of splendour in the clerestory, and asks what was in the minds of the
people who joined to produce, with such immense effort and at such
self-sacrifice, this astonishing effect, the question seems to answer
itself like an echo. With only half of an atrophied imagination, in a
happy mood we could still see the nave and transepts filled with ten
thousand people on their knees, and the Virgin, crowned and robed,
seating herself on the embroidered cushion that covered her imperial
throne; sparkling with gems; bearing in her right hand the sceptre, and
in her lap the infant King; but, in the act of seating herself, we should
see her pause a moment to look down with love and sympathy on us, —
her people, — who pack the enormous hall, and throng far out beyond
the open portals; while, an instant later, she glances up to see that her
great lords, spiritual and temporal, the advisers of her judgment, the
supports of her authority, the agents of her will, shall be in place;
robed, mitred, armed; bearing the symbols of her authority and their
office; on horseback, lance in hand; all of them ready at a sign to carry-
out a sentence of judgment or an errand of mercy; to touch with the
sceptre or to strike with the sword ; and never err.

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 183

There they still stand! unchanged, unfaded, as alive and complete
as when they represented the real world, and the people below were the
unreal and ephemeral pageant! Then the reality was the Queen of
Heaven on her throne in the sanctuary, and her court in the glass; not
the queens or princes who were prostrating themselves, with the crowd,
at her feet. These people knew the Virgin as well as they knew their
own mothers; every jewel in her crown, every stitch of gold-embroid-
ery in her many robes; every colour; every fold; every expression on
the perfectly familiar features of her grave, imperial face ; every care
that lurked in the silent sadness of her power; repeated over and over
again, in stone, glass, ivory, enamel, wood; in every room, at the
head of every bed, hanging on every neck, standing at every street-
corner, the Virgin was as familiar to every one of them as the sun or
the seasons; far more familiar than their own earthly queen or countess,
although these were no strangers in their daily life ; familiar from the
earliest childhood to the last agony ; in every joy and every sorrow and
every danger; in every act and almost in every thought of life, the
Virgin was present with a reality that never belonged to her Son or
to the Trinity, and hardly to any earthly being, prelate, king, or
kaiser; her daily life was as real to them as their own loyalty which
brought to her the best they had to offer as the return for her bound-
less sympathy; but while they knew the Virgin as though she were one
of themselves, and because she had been one of themselves, they were
not so familiar with all the officers of her court at Chartres; and pil-
grims from abroad, like us, must always have looked with curious
interest at the pageant.

Far down the nave, next the western towers, the rank began with
saints, prophets, and martyrs, of all ages and countries; local, like
Saint Lubin; national, like Saint Martin of Tours and Saint Hilary of
Poitiers; popular like Saint Nicholas; militant like Saint George; with-
out order; symbols like Abraham and Isaac; the Virgin herself, holding
on her lap the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost; Christ with the Alpha

i84 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

and Omega; Moses and Saint Augustine; Saint Peter; Saint Mary the
Egyptian; Saint Jerome; a whole throne-room of heavenly powers,
repeating, within, the pageant carved on the porches and on the portals
without. From the croisee in the centre, where the crowd is most dense,
one sees the whole almost better than Mary sees it from her high altar,
for there all the great rose windows flash in turn, and the three twelfth-
century lancets glow on the western sun. When the eyes of the throng
are directed to the north, the Rose of France strikes them almost with
a physical shock of colour, and, from the south, the Rose of Dreux
challenges the Rose of France.

Every one knows that there is war between the two ! The thirteenth
century has few secrets. There are no outsiders. We are one family as
we are one Church. Every man and woman here, from Mary on her
throne to the beggar on the porch, knows that Pierre de Dreux detests
Blanche of Castile, and that their two windows carry on war across the
very heart of the cathedral. Both unite only in asking help from Mary;
but Blanche is a woman, alone in the world with young children to
protect, and most women incline strongly to suspect that Mary will
never desert her. Pierre, with all his masculine strength, is no courtier.
He wants to rule by force. He carries the assertion of his sex into the
very presence of the Queen of Heaven.

The year happens to be 1230, when the roses may be supposed just
finished and showing their whole splendour for the first time. Queen
Blanche is forty-three years old, and her son Louis is fifteen. Blanche
is a widow these four years, and Pierre a widower since 1221. Both are
regents and guardians for their heirs. They have necessarily carried
their disputes before Mary. Queen Blanche claims for her son, who is to
be Saint Louis, the place of honour at Mary's right hand ; she has taken
p>ossession of the north porch outside, and of the north transept within,
and has filled the windows with glass, as she is filling the porch with
statuary. Above is the huge rose; below are five long windows; and
all proclaim the homage that France renders to the Queen of Heaven.

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 185

The Rose of France shows in its centre the Virgin in her majesty,
seated, crowned, holding the sceptre with her right hand, while her
left supports the infant Christ-King on her knees; which shows that
she, too, is acting as regent for her Son. Round her, in a circle, are
twelve medallions; four containing doves; four six- winged angels or
Thrones; four angels of a lower order, but all symbolizing the gifts and
endowments of the Queen of Heaven. Outside these are twelve more
medallions with the Kings of Judah, and a third circle contains the
twelve lesser prophets. So Mary sits, hedged in by all the divinity that
graces earthly or heavenly kings; while between the two outer circles
are twelve quatrefoils bearing on a blue ground the golden lilies of
France; and in each angle below the rose are four openings, showing
alternately the lilies of Louis and the castles of Blanche. We who are
below, the common people, understand that France claims to protect
and defend the Virgin of Chartres, as her chief vassal, and that this
ostentatious profusion of lilies and castles is intended not in honour
of France, but as a demonstration of loyalty to Notre Dame, and an
assertion of her rights as Queen Regent of Heaven against all comers,
but particularly against Pierre, the rebel, who has the audacity to
assert rival rights in the opposite transept.

Beneath the rose are five long windows, very unlike the twelfth-
century pendants to the western rose. These five windows blaze with
red, and their splendour throws the Virgin above quite into the back-
ground. The artists, who felt that the twelfth-century glass was too
fine and too delicate for the new scale of the church, have not only
enlarged their scale and coarsened their design, but have coarsened
their colour-scheme also, discarding blue in order to crush us under the
earthly majesty of red. These windows, too, bear the stamp and seal
of Blanche's Spanish temper as energetically as though they bore her
portrait. The great central figure, the tallest and most commanding
in the whole church, is not the Virgin, but her mother Saint Anne,
standing erect as on the trumeau of the door beneath, and holding the

i86 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

infant Mary on her left arm. She wears no royal crown, but bears £
flowered sceptre. The only other difference between Mary and her
mother, that seems intended to strike attention, is that Mary sits,
while her mother stands; but as though to proclaim still more distinctly
that France supports the royal and divine pretensions of Saint Anne,
Queen Blanche has put beneath the figure a great shield blazoned
with the golden lilies on an azure ground.

With singular insistence on this motive. Saint Anne has at either
hand a royal court of her own, marked as her own by containing only
figures from the Old Testament. Standing next on her right is Solo-
mon, her Prime Minister, bringing wisdom in worldly counsel, and
trampling on human folly. Beyond Wisdom stands Law, figured by
Aaron with the Book, trampling on the lawless Pharaoh. Opposite them,
on Saint Anne's left, is David, the energy of State, trampling on a San'
suggesting suspicions of a Saul de Dreux; while last, Melchisedec who
is Faith, tramples on a disobedient Nebuchadnezzar Mauclerc.

How can we, the common people, help seeing all this, and much
more, when we know that Pierre de Dreux has been for years in con-
stant strife with the Crown and the Church? He is very valiant and
lion-hearted ; — so say the chroniclers, priests though they are; — very
skilful and experienced in war whether by land or sea; very adroit,
with more sense than any other great lord in France; but restless,
factious, and regardless of his word. Brave and bold as the day; full
of courtesy and "largesse " ; but very hard on the clergy ; a good Chris-
tian but a bad churchman! Certainly the first man of his time, says
Michelet! "I have never found any that sought to do me more ill
than he," says Blanche, and Joinville gives her very words; indeed, this
year, 1 230, she has summoned our own Bishop of Chartres among others
to Paris in a court of peers, where Pierre has been found guilty of
treason and deposed. War still continues, but Pierre must make sub-
mission. Blanche has beaten him in politics and in the field ! Let us
look round and see how he fares in theology and art !

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 187

There is his rose — so beautiful that Blanche may well think it
seeks to do hers ill ! As colour, judge for yourselves whether it holds its
own against the flaming self-assertion of the opposite wall ! As subject,
it asserts flat defiance of the monarchy of Queen Blanche. In the cen-
tral circle, Christ as King is seated on a royal throne, both arms raised,
one holding the golden cup of eternal priesthood, the other, blessing
the world. Two great flambeaux burn beside Him. The four Apocalyp-
tic figures surround and worship Him ; and in the concentric circles
round the central medallion are the angels and the kings in a blaze of
colour, symbolizing the New Jerusalem.

All the force of the Apocalypse is there, and so is some of the weak-
ness of theology, for, in the five great windows below, Pierre shows his
training in the schools. Four of these windows represent what is called,
for want of a better name, the New Alliance; the dependence of the
New Testament on the Old ; but Pierre's choice in symbols was as mas-
culine as that of Blanche was feminine. In each of the four windows,
a gigantic Evangelist strides the shoulders of a colossal Prophet.
Saint John rides on Ezekiel ; Saint Mark bestrides Daniel ; Saint Mat-
thew is on the shoulders of Isaiah ; Saint Luke is carried by Jeremiah.
The effect verges on the grotesque. The balance of Christ's Church
seems uncertain. The Evangelists clutch the Prophets by the hair, and
while the synagogue stands firm, the Church looks small, feeble, and
vacillating. The new dispensation has not the air of mastery either
physical or intellectual; the old gives it all the support it has, and, in
the absence of Saint Paul, both old and new seem little concerned with
the sympathies of Frenchmen. The synagogue is stronger than the
Church, but even the Church is Jew.

That Pierre could ever have meant this is not to be dreamed ; but
when the true scholar gets thoroughly to work, his logic is remorseless,
his art is implacable, and his sense of humour is blighted. In the rose
above, Pierre had asserted the exclusive authority of Christ in the New
Jerusalem, and his scheme required him to show how the Church

I88 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

rested on the Evangelists below, who in their turn had no visible support
except what the Prophets gave them. Yet the artist may have had
a reason for weakening the Evangelists, because there remained the
Virgin ! One dares no more than hint at a motive so disrespectful to
the Evangelists; but it is certainly true that, in the central window,
immediately beneath the Christ, and His chief support, with the four
staggering Evangelists and Prophets on either hand, the Virgin stands,
and betrays no sign of weakness.

The compliment is singularly masculine; a kind of twelfth-century
flattery that might have softened the anger of Blanche herself, if the
Virgin had been her own; but the Virgin of Dreux is not the Virgin of
France. No doubt she still wears her royal crown, and her head is
circled with the halo; her right hand still holds the flowered sceptre,
and her left the infant Christ, but she stands, and Christ is King. Note,
too, that she stands directly opposite to her mother Saint Anne in the
Rose of France, so as to place her one stage lower than the Virgin of
France in the hierarchy. She is the Saint Anne of France, and shows
it. "She is no longer," says the official Monograph, "that majestic
queen who was seated on a throne, with her feet on the stool of honour;
the personages have become less imposing and the heads show the
decadence." She is the Virgin of Theology; she has her rights, and no
more; but she is not the Virgin of Chartres,

She, too, stands on an altar or pedestal, on which hangs a shield
bearing the ermines, an exact counterpart of the royal shield beneath
Saint Anne. In this excessive display of armorial bearings — for the
two roses above are crowded with them — one likes to think that these
great princes had in their minds not so much the thought of their own
importance — which is a modern sort of religion — as the thought of
their devotion to Mary. The assertion of power and attachment by one
is met by the assertion of equal devotion by the other, and while both
loudly proclaim their homage to the Virgin, each glares defiance across
the church. Pierre meant the Queen of Heaven to know that, in case

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 189

of need, her left hand was as good as her right, and truer; that the
ermines were as well able to defend her as the lilies, and that Brit-
tany would fight her battles as bravely as France. Whether his mean-
ing carried with it more devotion to the Virgin or more defiance to
France depends a little on the date of the windows, but, as a mere
point of history, every one must allow that Pierre's promise of alle-
giance was kept more faithfully by Brittany than that of Blanche and
Saint Lx)uis has been kept by France.

The date seems to be fixed by the windows themselves. Beneath
the Prophets kneel Pierre and his wife Alix, while their two children,
Yolande and Jean, stand. Alix died in 1221. Jean was born in 1217.
Yolande was affianced in marriage in 1227, while a child, and given to
Queen Blanche to be brought up as the future wife of her younger son
John, then in his eighth year. When John died, Yolande was contracted
to Thibaut of Champagne in 1231, and Blanche is said to have written
to Thibaut in consequence: "Sire Thibauld of Champagne, I have
heard that you have covenanted and promised to take to wife the
daughter of Count Perron of Brittany. Wherefore I charge you, if
you do not wish to lose whatever you possess in the kingdom of France,
not to do it. If you hold dear or love aught in the said kingdom, do it
not." Whether Blanche wrote in these words or not, she certainly pre-
vented the marriage, and Yolande remained single until 1238 when she
married the Comte de la Marche, who was, by the way, almost as bit-
ter an enemy of Blanche as Pierre had been; but by that time both
Blanche and Pierre had ceased to be regents. Yolande's figure in the
window is that of a girl, perhaps twelve or fourteen years old; Jean is
younger, certainly not more than eight or ten years of age; and the
appearance of the two children shows that the window itself should
date between 1225 and 1230, the year when Pierre de Dreux was
condemned because he had renounced his homage to King Lxjuis,
declared war on him, and invited the King of England into France. As
already told, Philippe Hurepel de Boulogne, the Comte de la Marche,

190 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Enguerrand de Couci, — nearly all the great nobles, — had been
leagued with Pierre de Dreux since Blanche's regency began in 1226.

That these transept windows harmonize at all, is due to the Virgin,
not to the donors. At the time they were designed, supposing it to be
during Blanche's regency (1226-36), the passions of these donors
brought France to momentary ruin, and the Virgin in Blanche's Rose
de France, as she looked across the church, could not see a single
friend of Blanche. What is more curious, she saw enemies in plenty,
and in full readiness for battle. We have seen in the centre of the small
rose in the north transept, Philippe Hurepel still waiting her orders;
across the nave, in another small rose of the south transept, sits Pierre
de Dreux on his horse. The upper windows on the side walls of the
choir are very interesting but impossible to see, even with the best
glasses, from the floor of the church. Their sequence and dates have
already been discussed ; but their feeling is shown by the character of
the Virgin, who in French territory, next the north transept, is still the
Virgin of France, but in Pierre's territory, next the Rose de Dreux,
becomes again the Virgin of Dreux, who is absorbed in the Child, —
not the Child absorbed in her, — and accordingly the window shows
the chequers and ermines.

The figures, like the stone figures outside, are the earliest of French
art, before any school of painting fairly existed. Among them, one can
see no friend of Blanche. Indeed, outside of her own immediate fam-
ily and the Church, Blanche had no friend of much importance except
the famous Thibaut of Champagne, the single member of the royal
family who took her side and suffered for her sake, and who, as far
as books tell, has no window or memorial here. One might suppose
that Thibaut, who loved both Blanche and the Virgin, would have
claimed a place, and perhaps he did; but one seeks him in vain. If
Blanche had friends here, they are gone. Pierre de Dreux, lance In
hand, openly defies her, and it was not on her brother-in-law Philippe
Hurepel that she could depend for defence.

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 191

This is the court pageant of the Virgin that shows itself to the peo-
ple who are kneeling at high mass. We, the public, whoever we are, —
Chartrain, Breton, Norman, Angevin, Frenchman, Percherain, or
what not, — know our local politics as intimately as our lords do,
or even better, for our imaginations are active, and we do not love
Blanche of Castile. We know how to read the passions that fill the
church. From the north transept Blanche flames out on us in splendid
reds and flings her Spanish castles in our face. From the south tran-
sept Pierre retorts with a brutal energy which shows itself in the
Prophets who serve as battle-chargers and in the Evangelists who serve
as knights, — mounted warriors of faith, — whose great eyes follow
us across the church and defy Saint Anne and her French shield oppo-
site. Pierre was not effeminate; Blanche was fairly masculine. Between
them, as a matter of sex, we can see little to choose; and, in any case,
it is a family quarrel; they are all cousins; they are all equals on earth,
and none means to submit to any superior except the Virgin and
her Son in heaven. The Virgin is not afraid. She has seen many
troubles worse than this; she knows how to manage perverse children,
and if necessary she will shut them up in a darker room than ever
their mothers kept open for them in this world. One has only to look
at the Virgin to see!

There she is, of course, looking down on us from the great window
above the high altar, where we never forget her presence! Is there a
thought of disturbance there? Around the curve of the choir are seven
great windows, without roses, filling the whole semicircle and the whole
vault, forty-seven feet high, and meant to dominate the nave as far
as the western portal, so that we may never forget how Mary fills
her church without being disturbed by quarrels, and may understand
why Saint Ferdinand and Saint Louis creep out of our sight, close by
the Virgin's side, far up above brawls; and why France and Brittany
hide their ugly or their splendid passions at the ends of the transepts,
out of sight of the high altar where Mary is to sit in state as Queen

192 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

with the young King on her lap. In an instant she will come, but we
have a moment still to look about at the last great decoration of her
palace, and see how the artists have arranged it.

Since the building of Sancta Sofia, no artist has had such a chance.
No doubt, Rheims and Amiens and Bourges and Beauvais, which are
now building, may be even finer, but none of them is yet finished, and
all must take their ideas from here. One would like, before looking at
it, to think over the problem, as though it were new, and so choose the
scheme that would suit us best if the decoration were to be done for
the first time. The architecture is fixed ; we have to do only with the col-
our of this mass of seven huge windows, forty-seven feet high, in the
clerestory, round the curve of the choir, which close the vista of the
church as viewed from the entrance. This vista is about three hundred
and thirty feet long. The windows rise above a hundred feet. How
ought this vast space to be filled? Should the perpendicular upward
leap of the architecture be followed and accented by a perpendicular
leap of colour? The decorators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
seem to have thought so, and made perpendicular architectural draw-
ings in yellow that simulated gold, and lines that ran with the general
lines of the building. Many fifteenth-century windows seem to be
made up of florid Gothic details rising in stages to the vault. No doubt
critics complained, and still complain, that the monotony of this
scheme, and its cheapness of intelligence, were objections; but at least
the effect was light, decorative, and safe. The artist could not go far
wrong and was still at liberty to do beautiful work, as can be seen in
any number of churches scattered broadcast over Europe and swarm-
ing in Paris and France. On the other hand, might not the artist dis-
regard the architecture and fill the space with a climax of colour? Could
he not unite the Roses of France and Dreux above the high altar in an
overpowering outburst of purples and reds? The seventeenth century
might have preferred to mass clouds and colours, and Michael Angelo,
in the sixteenth, might have known how to do it. What we want is

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 193

not the feeling of the artist so much as the feeling of Chartres. What
shall it be — the jewelled brilliancy of the western windows, or the
fierce self-assertion of Pierre Mauclerc, or the royal splendour of
Queen Blanche, or the feminine grace and decorative refinement of the
Charlemagne and Santiago windows in the apse?

Never again in art was so splendid a problem offered, either before
or since, for the artist of Chartres solved it, as he did the whole mat-
ter of fenestration, and later artists could only offer variations on his
work. You will see them at Bourges and Tours and in scores of thir-
teenth and fourteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth century churches
and windows, and perhaps in some of the twentieth century, — all
of them interesting and some of them beautiful, — and far be it from
us, mean and ignorant pilgrims of art, to condemn any intelligent effort
to vary or improve the effect; but we have set out to seek the feeling,
and while we think of art in relation to ourselves, the sermon of
Chartres, from beginning to end, teaches and preaches and insists
and reiterates and hammers into our torpid minds the moral that
the art of the Virgin was not that of her artists but her own. We
inevitably think of our tastes; they thought instinctively of hers.

In the transepts. Queen Blanche and Duke Perron, in legal posses-
sion of their territory, showed that they were thinking of each other
as well as of the Virgin, and claimed loudly that they ought each to
be first in the Virgin's favour; and they stand there in place, as the
thirteenth century felt them. Subject to their fealty to Mary, the
transepts belonged to them, and if Blanche did not, like Pierre, assert
herself and her son on the Virgin's window, perhaps she thought the
Virgin would resent Pierre's boldness the more by contrast with her
own good taste. So far as is known, nowhere does Blanche appear in
person at Chartres; she felt herself too near the Virgin to obtrude a
useless image, or she was too deeply religious to ask anything for her-
self. A queen who was to have two children sainted, to intercede for
her at Mary's throne, stood in a solitude almost as unique as that of

194 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Mary, and might ignore the raw brutalities of a man-at-arms; but
neither she nor Pierre has carried the quarrel into Mary's presence,
nor has the Virgin condescended even to seem conscious of their tem-
per. This is the theme of the artist — the purity, the beauty, the grace,
and the infinite loftiness of Mary's nature, among the things of earth,
and above the clamour of kings.

Therefore, when we, and the crushed crowd of kneeling worshippers
around us, lift our eyes at last after the miracle of the mass, we see,
far above the high altar, high over all the agitation of prayer, the pas-
sion of politics, the anguish of suflfering, the terrors of sin, only the
figure of the Virgin in majesty, looking down on her people, crowned,
throned, glorified, with the infant Christ on her knees. She does not
assert herself; probably she intends to be felt rather than feared. Com-
pared with the Greek Virgin, as you see her, for example, at Torcello,
the Chartres Virgin is retiring and hardly important enough for the
place. She is not exaggerated either in scale, drawing, or colour. She
shows not a sign of self-consciousness, not an effort for brilliancy, not
a trace of stage effect — hardly even a thought of herself, except that
she is at home, among her own people, where she is loved and known
as well as she knows them. The seven great windows are one compo-
sition; and it is plain that the artist, had he been ordered to make an
exhibition of power, could have overwhelmed us with a storm of pur-
ple, red, yellows, or given us a Virgin of Passion who would have torn
the vault asunder; his ability is never in doubt, and if he has kept
true to the spirit of the western portal and the twelfth-century, it is be-
cause the Virgin of Chartres was the Virgin of Grace, and ordered him
to paint her so. One shudders to think how a single false note — a sug-
gestion of meanness, in this climax of line and colour — would bring
the whole fabric down in ruins on the eighteenth-century meanness of
the choir below; and one notes, almost bashfully, the expedients of the
artists to quiet their effects. So the lines of the seven windows are
built up, to avoid the horizontal, and yet not exaggerate the vertical.

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 195

The architect counts here for more than the colourist; but the colour,
when you study it, suggests the same restraint. Three great windows
on the Virgin's right, balanced by three more on her left, show the
prophets and precursors of her Son; all architecturally support and
exalt the Virgin, in her celestial atmosphere of blue, shot with red,
calm in the certainty of heaven. Any one who is prematurely curious
to see the difference in treatment between different centuries should
go down to the church of Saint Pierre in the lower town, and study
there the methods of the Renaissance. Then we can come back to
study again the ways of the thirteenth century. The Virgin will wait;
she will not be angry; she knows her power; we all come back to he*
in the end.

Or the Renaissance, if one prefers, can wait equally well, while one
kneels with the thirteenth century, and feels the little one still can feel
of what it felt. Technically these apsidal windows have not received
much notice; the books rarely speak of them; travellers seldom look
at them ; and their height is such that even with the best glass, the
quality of the work is beyond our power to judge. We see, and the
artists meant that we should see, only the great lines, the colour, and .
the Virgin. The mass of suppliants before the choir look up to th€
light, clear blues and reds of this great space, and feel there the celes-
tial peace and beauty of Mary's nature and abode. There is heaven!
and Mary looks down from it, into her church, where she sees us on our
knees, and knows each one of us by name. There she actually is — ■
not in symbol or in fancy, but in person, descending on her errands
of mercy and listening to each one of us, as her miracles prove, or satis-
fying our prayers merely by her presence which calms our excitement
as that of a mother calms her child. She is there as Queen, not merely
as intercessor, and her power is such that to her the difference between
us earthly beings is nothing. Her quiet, masculine strength enchants
us most. Pierre Mauclerc and Philippe Hurepel and their men-at-
arms are afraid of her, and the Bishop himself is never quite at his ease

196 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

in her presence; but to peasants, and beggars, and people in trouble,
this sense of her power and calm is better than active sympathy.
People who suffer beyond the formulas of expression — who are
crushed into silence.and beyond pain — want no display of emotion —
no bleeding heart — no weeping at the foot of the Cross — no hyster-
ics— no phrases! They want to see God, and to know that He is watch-
ing over His own. How many women are there, in this mass of thir-
teenth century suppliants, who have lost children? Probably nearly
all, for the death rate is very high in the conditions of mediaeval life.
There are thousands of such women here, for it is precisely this
class who come most; and probably every one of them has looked up
to Mary in her great window, and has felt actual certainty, as though
she saw with her own eyes — there, in heaven, while she looked — her
own lost baby playing with the Christ-Child at the Virgin's knee, as
much at home as the saints, and much more at home than the kings.
Before rising from her knees, every one of these women will have bent
down and kissed the stone pavement in gratitude for Mary's mercy.
The earth, she says, is a sorry place, and the best of it is bad enough,
no doubt, even for Queen Blanche and the Duchess Alix who has had to
leave her children here alone; but there above is Mary in heaven who
sees and hears me as I see her, and who keeps my little boy till I come;
so I can wait with patience, more or less! Saints and prophets and
martyrs are all very well, and Christ is very sublime and just, but
Mary knows I

It was very childlike, very foolish, very beautiful, and very true,
— as art, at least: — so true that everything else shades off into vul-
garity, as you see the Persephone of a Syracusan coin shade off into
the vulgarity of a Roman emperor; as though the heaven that lies
about us in our infancy too quickly takes colours that are not so much
sober as sordid, and would be welcome if no worse than that. Vul-
garity, too, has feeling, and its expression in art has truth and even
pathos, but we shall have time enough in our lives for that, and all the

THE COURT OF THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN 197

moj« because, when we rise from our knees now, we have finished our
pilgrimage. We have done with Chartres. For seven hundred years
Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or less like us, and
will perhaps see them for another seven hundred years; but we shall
see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin in her majesty, with her
three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their
own strength and in God's providence as they were when Saint Louis
was born, but looking down from a deserted heaven, into an empty
church, on a dead faith.

CHAPTER XI

THE THREE QUEENS

AFTER worshipping at the shrines of Saint Michael on his Mount
and of the Virgin at Chartres, one may wander far and wide over
France, and seldom feel lost ; all later Gothic art comes naturally, and
no new thought disturbs the perfected form. Yet tourists of English
blood and American training are seldom or never quite at home there.
Commonly they feel it only as a stage-decoration. The twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, studied in the pure light of political economy, are
insane. The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited
cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman
— Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity
of all, the Virgin. Very rarely one lingers, with a mild sympathy, such
as suits the patient student of human error, willing to be interested in
what he cannot understand. Still more rarely, owing to some revival
of archaic instincts, he rediscovers the woman. This is perhaps the
mark of the artist alone, and his solitary privilege. The rest of us
cannot feel ; we can only study. The proper study of mankind is woman
and, by common agreement since the time of Adam, it is the most com-
plex and arduous. The study of Our Lady, as shown by the art of
Chartres, leads directly back to Eve, and lays bare the whole subject
of sex.

If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that
Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superflu-
ity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the
Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with
queen bees. Precisely where the French man may come in, on the
genealogical tree of parthenogenesis, one hesitates to say ; but certain

THE THREE QUEENS 199

it is that the French woman, from very early times, has shown qualities
peculiar to herself, and that the French woman of the Middle Ages was
a masculine character. Almost any book which deals with the social
side of the twelfth century has something to say on this subject, like
the following page from M. Garreau's volume published in 1899, on
the "Social State of France during the Crusades": —

A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the manners
of men and women. The rule that such and such feelings cr acts are permitted to
one sex and forbidden to the other was not fairly settled. Men had the right to
dissolve in tears, and women that of talking without prudery. ... If we look
at their intellectual level, the women appear distinctly superior. They are more
serious; more subtle. With them we do not seem dealing with the rude state of
civilization that their husbands belong to. ... As a rule, the women seem to
have the habit of weighing their acts ; of not yielding to momentary impressions.
While the sense of Christianity is more developed in them than in their husbands,
on the other hand they show more perfidy and art in crime. . . . One might doubt-
less prove by a series of examples that the maternal influence when it predominated
in the education of a son gave him a marked superiority over his contemporaries.
Richard Coeur-de-Lion the crowned poet, artist, the king whose noble manners and
refined mind in spite of his cruelty exercised so strong an impression on his age,
was formed by that brilliant Eleanor of Guienne who, in her struggle with her
husband, retained her sons as much as possible within her sphere of influence in
order to make party chiefs of them. Our great Saint Louis, as all know, was brought
up exclusively by Blanche of Castile; and Joinville, the charming writer so worthy
of Saint Louis's friendship, and apparently so superior to his surroundings, was
also the pupil of a widowed and regent mother.

The superiority of the woman was not a fancy, but a fact. Man's
business was to fight or hunt or feast or make love. The man was
also the travelling partner in commerce, commonly absent from home
for months together, while the woman carried on the business. The
woman ruled the household and the workshop; cared for the economy;
supplied the intelligence, and dictated the taste. Her ascendancy was
secured by her alliance with the Church, into which she sent her most
intelligent children ; and a priest or clerk, for the most part, counted
socially as a woman. Both physically and mentally the woman was
robust, as the men often complained, and she did not greatly resent

200 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

being treated as a man. Sometimes the husband beat her, dragged her
about by the hair, locked her up in the house; but he was quite con-
scious that she always got even with him in the end. As a matter of
fact, probably she got more than even. On this point, history, legend,
poetry, romance, and especially the popular fabliaux — invented to
amuse the gross tastes of the coarser class — are all agreed, and one
could give scores of volumes illustrating it. The greatest men illustrate
it best, as one might show almost at hazard. The greatest men of the
eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were William the Norman,"
his great grandson Henry II Plantagenet; Saint Louis of France;
and, if a fourth be needed, Richard Cceur-de-Lion. Notoriously all
these men had as much difficulty as Louis XIV himself with the
women of their family. Tradition exaggerates everything it touches,
but shows, at the same time, what is passing in the minds of the so-
ciety which tradites. In Normandy, the people of Caen have kept a
tradition, told elsewhere in other forms, that one day, Duke William,
— the Conqueror, — exasperated by having his bastardy constantly
thrown in his face by the Duchess Matilda, dragged her by the hair,
tied to his horse's tail, as far as the suburb of Vaucelles; and this
legend accounts for the splendour of the Abbaye-aux-Dames, because
William, the common people believed, afterwards regretted the im-
propriety, and atoned for it by giving her money to build the abbey.
The story betrays the man's weakness. The Abbaye-aux-Dames
stands in the same relation to the Abbaye-aux-Hommes that Matilda
took towards William. Inferiority there was none; on the contrary,
the woman was socially the superior, and William was probably more
afraid of her than she of him, if Mr. Freeman is right in insisting that
he married her in spite of her having a husband living, and certainly
two children. If William was the strongest man in the eleventh cen-
tury, his great-grandson, Henry II of England, was the strongest man
of the twelfth ; but the history of the time resounds with the noise of
his battles with Queen Eleanor whom he, at last, held in prison for

THE THREE QUEENS 20i

fourteen years. Prisoner as she was, she broke him down in the end.
One is tempted to suspect that, had her husband and children been
guided by her, and by her policy as peacemaker for the good of Guienne,
most of the disasters of England and France might have been post-
poned for the time; but we can never know the truth, for monks and
historians abhor emancipated women, — with good reason, since such
women are apt to abhor them, — and the quarrel can never be paci-
fied. Historians have commonly shown fear of women without admit-
ting it, but the man of the Middle Ages knew at least why he feared
the woman, and told it openly, not to say brutally. Long after Eleanor
and Blanche were dead, Chaucer brought the Wife of Bath on his
Shakespearean stage, to explain the woman, and as usual he touched
masculine frailty with caustic, while seeming to laugh at woman and
man alike : —

"My liege lady! generally," quoth he,
"Women desiren to have soverainetee."

The point was that the Wife of Bath, like Queen Blanche and Queen
Eleanor, not only wanted sovereignty, but won and held it.

That Saint Louis, even when a grown man and king, stood in awe
of his mother, Blanche of Castile, was not only notorious but seemed
to be thought natural. Joinville recorded it not so much to mark the
King's weakness, as the woman's strength; for his Queen, Margaret
of Provence, showed the courage which the King had not. Blanche and
Margaret were exceedingly jealous of each other. "One day," said
Joinville, "Queen Blanche went to the Queen's [Margaret] chamber
where her son [Louis IX] had gone before to comfort her, for she was in
great danger of death from a bad delivery; and he hid himself behind
the Queen [Margaret] to avoid being seen; but his mother perceived
him, and taking him by the hand said: ' Come along ! you will do
no good here ! ' and put him out of the chamber. Queen Margaret, ob-
serving this, and that she was to be separated from her husband, cried
aloud: 'Alas! will you not allow me to see my lord either living or

202 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

dying? ' " According to Joinville, King Louis always hid himself when,
in his wife's chamber, he heard his mother coming.

The great period of Gothic architecture begins with the coming of
Eleanor (i 137) and ends with the passing of Blanche (1252). Eleanor's
long life was full of energy and passion of which next to nothing is
known; the woman was always too slippery for monks or soldiers to
grasp.

Eleanor came to Paris, a Queen of fifteen years old, in 1 137, bringing
Poitiers and Guienne as the greatest dowry ever offered to the French
Crown. She brought also the tastes and manners of the South, little
in harmony with the tastes and manners of Saint Bernard whose au-
thority at court rivalled her own. The Abbe Suger supported her, but
the King leaned toward the Abb6 Bernard. What this puritan reaction
meant is a matter to be studied by itself, if one can find a cloister to
study in; but it bore the mark of most puritan reactions in its hostility
to women. As long as the woman remained docile, she ruled, through
the Church ; but the man feared her and was jealous of her, and she of
him. Bernard specially adored the Virgin because she was an example
of docile obedience to the Trinity who atoned for the indocility of
Eve, but Eve herself remained the instrument of Satan, and French
society as a whole showed a taste for Eves,

Eleanor could hardly be called docile. Whatever else she loved,
she certainly loved rule. She shared this passion to the full with her
only great successor and rival on the English throne. Queen Elizabeth,
and she happened to become Queen of France at the moment when
society was turning from worship of its military ideal. Saint Michael,
to worship of its social ideal, the Virgin. According to the monk
Orderic, men had begun to throw aside their old military dress and
manners even before the first crusade, in the days of William Rufus
(1087-1100), and to affect feminine fashions. In all ages, priests and
monks have denounced the growing vices of society, with more or less
reason; but there seems to have been a real outbreak of display at

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about the time of the first crusade, which set a deep mark on every sort

of social expression, even down to the shoes of the statues on the western

portal of Chartres: —

A debauched fellow named Robert [said Orderic] was the first, about the time
of William Rufus, who introduced the practice of filling the long points of the
shoes with tow, and of turning them up like a ram's horn. Hence he got the sur-
name of Cornard ; and this absurd fashion was speedily adopted by great numbers
of the nobility as a proud distinction and sign of merit. At this time effeminacy
was the prevailing vice throughout the world. . . . They parted their hair from
the crown of the head on each side of the forehead, and their locks grew long like
women, and wore long shirts and tunics, closely tied with points. ... In our days,
ancient customs are almost all changed for new fashions. Our wanton youths
are sunk in effeminacy. . . . They insert their toes in things like serpents' tails
which present to view the shape of scorpions. Sweeping the dusty ground with
the prodigious trains of their robes and mantles, they cover their hands with
gloves . . .

If you are curious to follow these monkish criticisms on your an-
cestors' habits, you can read Orderic at your leisure; but you want only
to carry in mind the fact that the generation of warriors who fought
at Hastings and captured Jerusalem were regarded by themselves as
effeminate, and plunged in luxury. "Their locks are curled with hot
irons, and instead of wearing caps, they bind their heads with fillets.
A knight seldom appears in public with his head uncovered and properly
shaved according to the apostolic precept." The effeminacy of the first
crusade took artistic shape in the west portal of Chartres and the glass
of Saint-Denis, and led instantly to the puritan reaction of Saint
Bernard, followed by the gentle asceticism of Queen Blanche and Saint
Louis. Whether the pilgrimages to Jerusalem and contact with the
East were the cause or only a consequence of this revolution, or
whether it was all one, — a result of converting the Northern pagans
to peaceful habits and the consequent enrichment of northern Europe,
— is indifferent; the fact and the date are enough. The art is French,
but the ideas may have come from anywhere, like the game of chess
which the pilgrims or crusaders brought home from Syria. In the
Oriental game, the King was followed step by step by a Minister

THE THREE QUEENS 205

whose functions were personal. The crusaders freed the piece from
control ; gave it liberty to move up or down or diagonally, forwards
and backwards; made it the most arbitrary and formidable champion
on the board, while the King and the Knightwere the most restricted in
movement; and this piece they named Queen, and called the Virgin: —

Li Baudrains traist sa ficrge por son paon sauver,
E cele son aufin qui cuida conquester
La firge ou le paon, ou faire reculer.

The aufin or dauphin became the Fou of the French game, and the
bishop of the English. Baldwin played his Virgin to save his pawn;
his opponent played the bishop to threaten either the Virgin or the
pawn.

For a hundred and fifty years, the Virgin and Queens ruled French
taste and thought so successfully that the French man has never yet
quite decided whether to be more proud or ashamed of it. Life has
ever since seemed a little flat to him, and art a little cheap. He saw
that the woman, in elevating herself, had made him appear ridiculous,
and he tried to retaliate with a wit not always sparkling, and too
often at his own expense. Sometimes in museums or collections of
bric-^-brac, you will see, in an illuminated manuscript, or carved on
stone, or cast in bronze, the figure of a man on his hands and knees,
bestridden by another figure holding a bridle and a whip; it is Aris-
totle, symbol of masculine wisdom, bridled and driven by woman.
Six hundred years afterwards, Tennyson revived the same motive in
Merlin, enslaved not for a time but forever. In both cases the satire
justly punished the man. Another version of the same story — per-
haps the original — was the Mystery of Adam, one of the earliest
Church plays. Gaston Paris says "it was written in England in the
twelfth century, and its author had real poetic talent; the scene of
the seduction of Eve by the serpent is one of the best pieces of Christian
dramaturgy. . . . This remarkable work seems to have been played no
longer inside the church, but under the porch": —

206

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Diabolus. Jo vi Adam mais trop est fols.

Eva. Un poi est durs.

Diabolus. II serra mols.

n est plus durs qui n'est enfers.

Eva. n est mult francs.

Diabolus. Ainz est mult sers.

Cure ne volt prendre de sei
Car la prenge sevals de tei.
Tu es fieblette et tendre chose
E es plus fresche que n'est rose.
Tu es plus blanche que cristal
Que neif que chiet sor glace en val.
Mai cuple en fist li Criatur.
Tu es trop tendre e il trop dur.
Mais neporquant tu es plus sage
£n grant sens as mis tun corrage
Por CO fait bon traire a tcL
Parler te voil.

Eva. Ore ja fai.

Devil. Adam I've seen, but he's too rough.

Eve. A little hard!

DevU. He'll soon be soft enough!

Harder than hell he is till now.
Eve. He's very frank!
Devil. Say very low!

To help himself he does not care;

The helping you shall be my share;

For you are tender, gentle, true,

The rose is not so fresh as you ;

Whiter than crystal, or than snow

That falls from heaven on ice below.

A sorry mixture God has brewed,

You too tender, he too rude.

But you have much the greater sense.

Your will is all intelligence.

Therefore it is I turn to you.

I want to tell you —
Eve. Do it now!

The woman's greater intelligence was to blame for Adam's fall.
Eve was justly punished because she should have known better, while
Adam, as the Devil truly said, was a dull animal, hardly worth the
trouble of deceiving. Adam was disloyal, too, untrue to his wife after
being untrue to his Creator: —

La femme que tu me donas
£le fist prime icest trespas
Donat le mei e jo mangai.
Or mest vis tomez est a gwai
Mai acontai icest manger.
Jo ai mesfait par ma moiller.

The woman that you made me take
First led me into this mistake.
She gave the apple that I ate
And brought me to this evil state.
Badly for me it turned, I own.
But all the fault is hers alone.

The audience accepted this as natural and proper. They recognized
the man as, of course, stupid, cowardly, and traitorous. The men of
the baser sort revenged themselves by boorishness that passed with
them for wit in the taverns of Arras, but the poets of the higher class
commonly took sides with the women. Even Chaucer, who lived after
the glamour had faded, and who satirized women to satiety, told their
tale in his " Legend of Good Women," with evident sympathy. To him,
also, the ordinary man was inferior, — stupid, brutal, and untrue.
"Full brittle is the truest," he said: —

THE THREE QUEENS 207

For well I wote that Christ himself telleth
That in Israel, as wide as is the lond,
That so great faith in all the lond he ne fond
As in a woman, and this is no lie;
And as for men, look ye, such tyrannie
They doen all day, assay hem who so list,
The truest is full brotell for to trist.

Neither brutality nor wit helped the man much. Even Bluebeard
in the end fell a victim to the superior qualities of his last wife, and
Scheherazade's wit alone has preserved the memory of her royal
husband. The tradition of thirteenth-century society still rules the
French stage. The struggle between two strong-willed women to con-
trol one weak-willed man is the usual motive of the French drama
in the nineteenth century, as it was the whole motive of Parte-
nopeus of Blois, one of the best twelfth-century romans; and Join-
ville described it, in the middle of the thirteenth, as the leading motive
in the court of Saint Louis, with Queen Blanche and Queen Margaret
for players, and Saint Lx)uis himself for pawn.

One has only to look at the common, so-called Elzevirian, volume
of thirteenth-century nouvelles to see the Frenchman as he saw him-
self. The story of "La Comtesse de Ponthieu" is the more Shake-
spearean, but " La Belle Jehanne " is the more natural and lifelike. The
plot is the common masculine intrigue against the woman, which was
used over and over again before Shakespeare appropriated it in " Much
Ado " ; but its French development is rather in the line of "All 's Well."
The fair Jeanne, married to a penniless knight, not at all by her
choice, but only because he was a favourite of her father's, was a
woman of the true twelfth-century type. She broke the head of the
traitor, and when he, with his masculine falseness, caused her husband
to desert her, she disguised herself as a squire and followed Sir Robert
to Marseilles in search of service in war, for the poor knight could get
no other means of livelihood. Robert was the husband, and the wife,
in entering his service as squire without pay, called herself John: —

209

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Molt fu mesire Robiers dolans cant il vint
a Marselle de jou k'il n'oi parler de nulle chose
ki fust ou pais; si dist a Jehan:

— Ke ferons nous? Vous m'aves preste de
vos deniers la vostre nHerchi; si les vos ren-
derai car je venderai mon palefroi et m'acui-
terai a vous.

— Sire, dist Jehans, crees moi se il vous
plaist je vous dirai ke nous ferons; jou ai
bien enchore .c. sous de tournois; s'il vous
plaist je venderai nos .ii. chevaxis et en ferai
deniers; et je suis li miousdres boulengiers
ke vous sacies; si ferai pain franjois et je ne
douc mie ke je ne gaagne bien et largement
mon depens.

— Jehans, dist mesire Robiers, je m'otroi
del tout a faire votre volente.

Et lendemain vendi Jehans ses .ii. chevaux
,X. Uvres de tornois, et acbata son ble et le fist
muire, et achata des corbelles et coumencha a
faire pain frangois si bon et si bien fait k'il
en vendoit plus ke li doi melleur boulengier
de la ville; et fist tant dedens les .ii. ans
k'il ot bien .c. livres de katel. Lors dist Jehans
a son segnour:

— Je lo bien que nous louons une tres grant
mason et jou akaterai del vin et hierbegerai
la bonne gent.

— Jehan, dist mesire Robiers, faites a vo
volente kar je I'otroi et si me loc molt de vous.

Jehans loua une mason grant et bielle, et si
hierbrega la bonne gent et gaegnoit ases a
plente, et viestoit son segnour biellement
et richement ; et avoit mesire Robiers son pale-
froi et aloit boire et mengier aveukes les plus
vallans de la ville; et Jehans li envoioit vins
et viandes ke tout dl ki o lui conpagnoient
s'en esmervelloient. Si gaegna tant ke dedens
iiii. ans il gaegna plus de .ccc. livres de meuble
sains son hamois qui valoit bien .L. livres.

Much was Sir Robert grieved when he came
to Marseilles and found that there was no
talk of anything doing in the country; and
he said to John : " What shall we do? You have
lent me your money; I thank you, and will
repay you, for I will sell my palfrey and dis-
charge the debt to you."

"Sir," said John, "trust to me, if you
please, I wiU tell you what we will do; I have
stiU a hundred sous; if you please I will sell
our two horses and turn them into money;
and I am the best baker you ever knew; I will
make French bread, and I've no doubt I shall
pay my expenses well and make money."

"John," said Sir Robert, "I agree wholly
to do whatever you hke."

And the next day John sold their two horses
for ten poimds, and bought his wheat and had
it ground, and bought baskets, and began to
make French bread so good and so well made
that he sold more of it than the two best
bakers in the dty; and made so much within
two years that he had a good hundred pounds
property. Then he said to his lord: "I advise
our hiring a very large house, and I will buy
wine and will keep lodgings for good society."

"John," said Sir Robert, "do what you
please, for I grant it, and am greatly pleased
with you."

John hired a large and fine house and
lodged the best people and gained a great
plenty, and dressed his master handsomely
and richly; and Sir Robert kept his palfrey
and went out to eat and drink with the best
people of the city; and John sent them such
wines and food that all his companions mar-
velled at it. He made so much that within
four years he gained more than three hundred
pounds in money besides clothes, etc., well
worth fifty.

The docile obedience of the man to the woman seemed as reason-
able to the thirteenth century as the devotion of the woman to the
man, not because she loved him, for there was no question of love, but
because he was her man, and she owned him as though he were her

THE THREE QUEENS 209

child. The tale went on to develop her character always in the same
sense. When she was ready, Jeanne broke up the establishment at
Marseilles, brought her husband back to Hainault, and made him,
without knowing her object, kill the traitor and redress her wrongs.
Then after seven years' patient waiting, she revealed herself and re-
sumed her place.

If you care to see the same type developed to its highest capacity,
go to the theatre the first time some ambitious actress attempts the
part of Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare realized the thirteenth-century
woman more vividly than the thirteenth-century poets ever did ; but
that is no new thing to say of Shakespeare. The author of " La Com-
tesse de Ponthieu" made no bad sketch of the character. These are
fictions, but the Chronicles contain the names of women by scores who
were the originals of the sketch. The society which Orderic described
in Normandy — the generation of the first crusade — produced a
great variety of Lady Macbeths. In the country of Evreux, about
1 100, Orderic says that "a worse than civil war was waged between two
powerful brothers, and the mischief was fomented by the spiteful
jealousy of their haughty wives. The Countess Havise of Evreux took
offence at some taunts uttered by Isabel de Conches, — wife of Ralph,
the Seigneur of Conches, some ten miles from Evreux, — and used all
her influence with her husband, Count William, and his barons, to
make trouble. . . . Both the ladies who stirred up these fierce enmities
were great talkers and spirited as well as handsome; they ruled their
husbands, oppressed their vassals, and inspired terror in various
ways. But still their characters were very different. Havise had wit
and eloquence, but she was cruel and avaricious. Isabel was generous,
enterprising, and gay, so that she was beloved and esteemed by those
about her. She rode in knight's armour when her vassals were called
to war, and showed as much daring among men-at-arms and mounted
knights as Camilla. . . ." More than three hundred years afterwards,
far ofif in the Vosges, from a village never heard of, appeared a com-

2IO MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

mon peasant of seventeen years old, a girl without birth, education,
wealth, or claim of any sort to consideration, who made her way to
Chinon and claimed from Charles VII a commission to lead his army
against the English. Neither the king nor the court had faith in her,
and yet the commission was given, and the rank-and-file showed again
that the true Frenchman had more confidence in the woman than in
the man, no matter what the gossips might say. No one was surprised
when Jeanne did what she promised, or when the men burned her
for doing it. There were Jeannes in every village. Ridicule was power-
less against them. Even Voltaire became what the French call frankly
"bate," in trying it.

Eleanor of Guienne was the greatest of all Frenchwomen. Her
decision was law, whether in Bordeaux or Poitiers, in Paris or in Pales-
tine, in London or in Normandy; in the court of Louis VII, or in that
of Henry II, or in her own Court of Love. For fifteen years she was
Queen of France; for fifty she was Queen in England; for eighty or
thereabouts she was equivalent to Queen over Guienne. No other
Frenchwoman ever had such rule. Unfortunately, as Queen of France,
she struck against an authority greater than her own, that of Saint Ber-
nard, and after combating it, with Suger's help, from 1 137 until 1 152,
the monk at last gained such mastery that Eleanor quitted the coun-
try and Suger died. She was not a person to accept defeat. She royally
divorced her husband and went back to her own kingdom of Guienne.
Neither Louis nor Bernard dared to stop her, or to hold her territories
from her, but they put the best face they could on their defeat by pro-
claiming her as a person of irregular conduct. The irregularity would
not have stood in their way, if they had dared to stand in hers, but
Louis was much the weaker, and made himself weaker still by allowing
her to leave him for the sake of Henry of Anjou, a story of a sort that
rarely raised the respect in which French kings were held by French
society. Probably politics had more to do with the matter than per-
sonal attachments, for Eleanor was a great ruler, the equal of any

THE THREE QUEENS 211

ordinary king, and more powerful than most kings living in 1152. If
she deserted France in order to join the enemies of France, she had seri-
ous reasons besides love for young Henry of Anjou ; but in any case she
did, as usual, what pleased her, and forced Louis to pronounce the di-
vorce at a council held at Beaugency, March 18, 1 152, on the usual pre-
text of relationship. The humours of the twelfth century were Shake-
spearean. Eleanor, having obtained her divorce at Beaugency, to the
deep regret of all Frenchmen, started at once for Poitiers, knowing how
unsafe she was in any territory but her own. Beaugency is on the
Loire, between Orleans and Blois, and Eleanor's first night was at
Blois, or should have been; but she was told, on arriving, that Count
Thibaut of Blois, undeterred by King Louis's experience, was making
plans to detain her, with perfectly honourable views of marriage; and,
as she seems at least not to have been in love with Thibaut, she was
obliged to depart at once, in the night, to Tours. A night journey on
horseback from Blois to Tours in the middle of March can have been
no pleasure-trip, even in 1 152 ; but, on arriving at Tours in the morning,
Eleanor found that her lovers were still so dangerously near that she
set forward at once on the road to Poitiers. As she approached her
own territory she learned that Geoffrey of Anjou, the younger brother
of her intended husband, was waiting for her at the border, with views
of marriage as strictly honourable as those of all the others. She was
driven to take another road, and at last got safe to Poitiers.

About no figure in the Middle Ages, man or woman, did so many
legends grow, and with such freedom, as about Eleanor, whose strength
appealed to French sympathies and whose adventures appealed to
their imagination. They never forgave Louis for letting her go. They
delighted to be told that in Palestine she had carried on relations
of the most improper character, now with a Saracen slave of great
beauty; now with Raymond of Poitiers, her uncle, the handsomest
man of his time; now with Saladin himself; and, as all this occurred
at Antioch in 1147 or 1148, they could not explain why her husband

212 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

should have waited until 1 152 in order to express his unwilling disap-
proval ; but they quoted with evident sympathy a remark attributed
to her that she thought she had married a king, and found she had mar-
ried a monk. To the Frenchman, Eleanor remained always sympa-
thetic, which is the more significant because, in English tradition, her
character suffered a violent and incredible change. Although English
history has lavished on Eleanor somewhat more than her due share of
conventional moral reproof, considering that, from the moment she
married Henry of Anjou, May 18, 1152, she was never charged with a
breath of scandal, it atoned for her want of wickedness by French
standards, in the usual manner of historians, by inventing traits which
reflected the moral standards of England. Tradition converted her into
the fairy-book type of feminine jealousy and invented for her the
legend of the Fair Rosamund and the poison of toads.

For us, both legends are true. They reflected, not perhaps the
character of Eleanor, but what the society liked to see acted on its
theatre of life. Eleanor's real nature in no way concerns us. The
single fact worth remembering was that she had two daughters by
Louis VII, as shown in the table; who, in due time, married — Mary,
in 1 164, married Henry, the great Count of Champagne; AHx, at the
same time, became Countess of Chartres by marriage with Thibaut,
who had driven her mother from Blois in 1 152 by his marital intentions.
Henry and Thibaut were brothers whose sister Alix had married
Louis VII in 1160, eight years after the divorce. The relations thus
created were fantastic, especially for Queen Eleanor, who, besides her
two French daughters, had eight children as Queen of England. Her
second son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, born in 1157, was affianced in
1 1 74 to a daughter of Louis VII and Alix, a child only six years old,
who was sent to England to be brought up as future queen. This was
certairJy Eleanor's doing, and equally certain was it that the child came
to no good in the English court. The historians, by exception, have
not charged this crime to Queen Eleanor; they charged it to Eleanor's

THE THREE QUEENS 213

husband, who passed most of his life in crossing his wife's political
plans; but with politics we want as little as possible to do. We are
concerned with the artistic and social side of life, and have only to
notice the coincidence that while the Virgin was miraculously using
the power of spiritual love to elevate and purify the people, Eleanor and
her daughters were using the power of earthly love to discipline and
refine the courts. Side by side with the crude realities about them,
they insisted on teaching and enforcing an ideal that contradicted
the realities, and had no value for them or for us except in the con-
tradiction.

The ideals of Eleanor and her daughter Mary of Champagne were
a form of religion, and if you care to see its evangels, you had best
go directly to Dante and Petrarch, or, if you like it better, to Don
Quixote de la Mancha. The religion is dead as Demeter, and its art
alone survives as, on the whole, the highest expression of man's thought
or emotion ; but in its day it was almost as practical as it now is fanci-
ful. Eleanor and her daughter Mary and her granddaughter Blanche
knew as well as Saint Bernard did, or Saint Francis, what a brute the
emancipated man could be; and as though they foresaw the society
of-the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, they used every terror they
could invent, as well as every tenderness they could invoke, to tame
the beasts around them. Their charge was of manners, and, to teach
manners, they made a school which they called their Court of Love,
with a code of law to which they gave the name of "courteous love."
The decisions of this court were recorded, like the decisions of a mod-
ern bench, under the names of the great ladies who made them, and
were enforced by the ladies of good society for whose guidance they
were made. They are worth reading, and any one who likes may read
them to this day, with considerable scepticism about their genuineness.
The doubt is only ignorance. We do not, and never can, know the
twelfth-century woman, or, for that matter, any other woman, but we
do know the literature she created; we know the art she lived in, and

214 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

the religion she professed. We can collect from them some idea why
the Virgin Mary ruled, and what she was taken to be, by the world
which worshipped her.

Mary of Champagne created the literature of courteous love. She
must have been about twenty years old when she married Count
Henry and went to live at Troyes, not actually a queen in title, but
certainly a queen in social influence. In 1 164, Champagne was a power-
ful country, and Troyes a centre of taste. In Normandy, at the same
date, William of Saint Pair and Wace were writing the poetry we
know. In Champagne the court poet was Christian of Troyes, whose
poems were new when the churches of Noyon and Senlis and Saint
Leu d'Esserent, and the fleche of Chartres, and the Leaning Tower
of Pisa, were building, at the same time with the Abbey of V6zelay, and
before the church at Mantes. Christian died not long after 1 1 75, leav-
ing a great mass of verse, much of which has survived, and which
you can read more easily than you can read Dante or Petrarch, al-
though both are almost modern compared with Christian. The qual-
ity of this verse is something like the quality of the glass windows —
conventional decoration; colours in conventional harmonies; refine-
ment, restraint, and feminine delicacy of taste. Christian has not the
grand manner of the eleventh century, and never recalls the masculine
strength of the "Chanson de Roland" or"Raoul de Cambrai." Even
his most charming story, "Erec et Enide," carries chiefly a moral of
courtesy. His is poet-laureate's work, says M. Gaston Paris; the
flower of a twelfth-century court and of twelfth-century French; the
best example of an admirable language; but not lyric; neither strong,
nor deep, nor deeply felt. What we call tragedy is unknown to it.
Christian's world is sky-blue and rose, with only enough red to give it
warmth, and so flooded with light that even its mysteries count only
by the clearness with which they are shown.

Among other great works, before Mary of France came to Troyes,
Christian had, toward 1160, written a "Tristan," which is lost. Mary

THE THREE QUEENS 215

herself, he says, gave him the subject of "Lancelot," with the request
or order to make it a lesson of "courteous love," which he obeyed.
Courtesy has lost its meaning as well as its charm, and you might find
the " Chevalier de la Charette" even more unintelligible than tiresome;
but its influence was great in its day, and the lesson of courteous love,
under the authority of Mary of Champagne, lasted for centuries as
the standard of taste. "Lancelot" was never finished, but later, not
long after 1174, Christian wrote a "Perceval," or "Conte du Graal,"
which must also have been intended to please Mary, and which is in-
teresting because, while the "Lancelot" gave the twelfth-century idea
of courteous love, the "Perceval" gave the twelfth-century idea of
religious mystery. Mary was certainly concerned with both. "It is
for this same Mary," says Gaston Paris, " that Walter of Arras under-
took his poem of 'Eracle'; she was the object of the songs of the
troubadours as well as of their French imitators; for her use also she
caused the translations of books of piety like Genesis, or the paraphrase
at great length, in verse, of the psalm 'Eructavit.'"

With her theories of courteous love, every one is more or less famil-
iar if only from the ridicule of Cervantes and the follies of Quixote,
who, though four hundred years younger, was Lancelot's child ; but we
never can know how far she took herself and her laws of love seriously,
and to speculate on so deep a subject as her seriousness is worse than
useless, since she would herself have been as uncertain as her lovers
were. Visionary as the courtesy was, the Holy Grail was as practical
as any bric-a-brac that has survived of the time. The mystery of
Perceval is like that of the Gothic cathedral, illuminated by floods of
light, and enlivened by rivers of colour. Unfortunately Christian never
told what he meant by the fragment, itself a mystery, in which he
narrated the story of the knight who saw the Holy Grail, because the
knight, who was warned, as usual, to ask no questions, for once, unlike
most knights, obeyed the warning when he should have disregarded it.
As knights-errant necessarily did the wrong thing in order to make

2l6

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

their adventures possible, Perceval's error cannot be in itself mysterious,
nor was the castle in any way mysterious where the miracle occurred.
It appeared to him to be the usual castle, and he saw nothing unusual
in the manner of his reception by the usual old lord, or in the fact
that both seated themselves quite simply before the hall-fire with
the usual household. Then, as though it were an everyday habit, the
Holy Grail was brought in (Bartsch, " Chrestomathie," 183-85, ed.
1895):—

Et leans avail luminaire

Si grant con Tan le porrait faire

De chandoiles a un ostel.

Que qu'il parloient d'un et d'el,

Uns vallez d'une chambre vint

Qui una blanche lance tint

Ampoigniee par le mi lieu.

Si passa par endroit le feu

Et cil qui al feu se seoient,

Et tuit dl de leans veoient

La lance blanche et le fer blanc.

S'issoit une gote de sang

Del fer de la lance au sommet,

Et jusqu'a la main au vaslet

Coroit cele gote vermoille. ....

A tant dui autre vaslet vindrent

Qui chandeliers an lors mains tindrent

De fin or ovrez a neel.

Li vaslet estoient moult bel

Qui les chandeliers aportoient.

An chacun chandelier ardoient

Dous chandoiles a tot le mains.

Un graal antre ses dous mains

Une demoiselle tenoit,

Qui avec les vaslets venoit,

Bele et gente et bien acesmee.

Quant ele fu leans antree

Atot le graal qu'ele tint

Une si granz clartez i vint

Qu'ausi perdirent les chandoiles

Lor darte come les estoiles

Qant li solauz luist et la lune.

Apres cell an revint une

Qui tint un tailleor d'argent.

And, within, the hall was bright
As any hall could be with light
Of candles in a house at night.
So, while of this and that they talked,
A squire from a chamber walked,
Bearing a white lance in his hand,
Grasped by the middle, like a wand;
And, as he passed the chimney wide.
Those seated by the fireside,
And all the others, caught a glance
Of the white steel and the white lance.
As they looked, a drop of blood
Down the lance's handle flowed;
Down to where the youth's hand stood.
From the lance-head at the top
They saw run that crimson drop. . . .
Presently came two more squires.
In their hands two chandeliers.
Of fine gold in enamel wrought.
Each squire that the candle brought
Was a handsome chevalier.
There burned in every chandelier
Two lighted candles at the least.
A damsel, graceful and well dressed,
Behind the squires followed fast
Who carried in her hands a graal;
And as she came within the hall
With the graal there came a light
So brilliant that the candles all
Lost clearness, as the stars at night
When moon shines, or in day the sun.

After her there followed one
Who a dish of silver bore.

THE THREE QUEENS

217

Le graal qui aloit devant

Dc fin or esmere estoit,

Pierres precieuses avoit

El graal de maintes menieres

Des plus riches et des plus chieres

Qui en mer ne en terra soient.

Totes autres pierres passoient

Celes del graal sanz dotance.

Tot ainsi con passa la lance

Par devant le lit trespasserent

Et d'une chambre a I'autre alerent.

Et li vaslet les vit passer,!

Ni n'osa mire demander

Del graal cui I'au an servoit.

The graal, which had gone before,
Of gold the finest had been made.
With precious stones had been inlaid,
Richest and rarest of each kind
That man in sea or earth could find.
All other jewels far surpassed
Those which the holy graal enchased.

Just as before had passed the lance
They all before the bed advance.
Passing straightway through the hall,
And the knight who saw them pass
Never ventured once to ask
For the meaning of the graal.

The simplicity of this narration gives a certain dramatic effect to
the mystery, like seeing a ghost in full daylight, but Christian carried
simplicity further still. He seemed either to feel, or to want others to
feel, the reality of the adventure and the miracle, and he followed up
the appearance of the graal by a solid meal in the style of the twelfth
century, such as one expects to find in " Ivanhoe" or the "Talisman."
The knight sat down with his host to the best dinner that the county
of Champagne afforded, and they ate their haunch of venison with the
graal in full view. They drank their Champagne wine of various sorts,
out of gold cups: —

Vins clers ne raspez ne lor faut
A copes dorees a boivre;

they sat before the fire and talked till bedtime, when the squires
made up the beds in the hall, and brought in supper — dates, figs,
nutmegs, spices, pomegranates, and at last lectuaries, suspiciously like
what we call jams; and "alexandrine gingerbread"; after which they
drank various drinks, with or without spice or honey or pepper; and
old moret, which is thought to be mulberry wine, but which generally
went with clairet, a colourless grape-juice, or piment. At least, here
are the lines, and one may translate them to suit one's self: —

Et li vaslet aparellierent
Leo lis et le fruit au colchier

218 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Que 3 en i ot de moult chier,
Dates, figues, et nois mugates,
Girofles et pomes de grenates,
£t leituaires an la fin,
Et gingenbret alixandrin.
Apres ce burent de maint boivre,
Piment ou n'ot ne miel ne poivre
Et viez more et der sirop.

The twelfth century had the child's love of sweets and spices and
preserved fruits, and drinks sweetened or spiced, whether they were
taken for supper or for poetry ; the true knight's palate was fresh and
his appetite excellent either for sweets or verses or love; the world was
young then ; Robin Hoods lived in every forest, and Richard Cceur-de-
Lion was not yet twenty years old. The pleasant adventures of Robin
Hood were real, as you can read in the stories of a dozen outlaws, and
men troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears
did, in the mountains. Life had miseries enough, but few shadows
deeper than those of the imaginative lover, or the terrors of ghosts at
night. Men's imaginations ran riot, but did not keep them awake; at
least, neither the preserved fruits nor the mulberry wine nor the clear
syrup nor the gingerbread nor the Holy Graal kept Perceval awake, but
he slept the sound and healthy sleep of youth, and when he woke the
next morning, he felt only a mild surprise to find that his host and
household had disappeared, leaving him to ride away without farewell,
breakfast, or Graal.

Christian wrote about Perceval in 1174 in the same spirit in which
the workmen in glass, thirty years later, told the story of Charlemagne.
One artist worked for Mary of Champagne; the others for Mary of
Chartres, commonly known as the Virgin ; but all did their work in
good faith, with the first, fresh, easy instinct of colour, light, and line.
Neither of the two Maries was mystical, in a modern sense; none of
the artists was oppressed by the burden of doubt; their scepticism was
as childlike as faith. If one has to make an exception, perhaps the
passion of love was more serious than that of religion, and gave to

THE THREE QUEENS 219

religion the deepest emotion, and the most complicated one, which
society knew. Love was certainly a passion ; and even more certainly
it was, as seen in poets like Dante and Petrarch, — in romans like
"Lancelot" and " Aucassin," — in ideals like the Virgin, — compli-
cated beyond modern conception. For this reason the loss of Chris-
tian's "Tristan" makes a terrible gap in art, for Christian's poem
would have given the first and best idea of what led to courteous love.
The "Tristan" was written before 11 60, and belonged to the cycle of
Queen Eleanor of England rather than to that of her daughter Mary of
Troyes; but the subject was one neither of courtesy nor of France; it
belonged to an age far behind the eleventh century, or even the tenth,
or indeed any century within the range of French history; and it was
as little fitted for Christian's way of treatment as for any avowed
burlesque. The original Tristan — critics say — was not French, and
neither Tristan nor Isolde had ever a drop of French blood in their
veins. In their form as Christian received it, they were Celts or Scots;
they came from Brittany, Wales, Ireland, thenorthern ocean, or farther
still. Behind the Welsh Tristan, which passed probably through Eng-
land to Normandy and thence to France and Champagne, critics de-
tect a far more ancient figure living in a form of society that France
could not remember ever to have known. King Marc was a tribal
chief of the Stone Age whose subjects loved the forest and lived on the
sea or in caves ; King Marc's royal hall was a common shelter on the
banks of a stream, where every one was at home, and king, queen,
knights, attendants, and dwarf slept on the floor, on beds laid down
where they pleased ; Tristan's weapons were the bow and stone knife;
he never saw a horse or a spear; his ideas of loyalty and Isolde's ideas
of marriage were as vague as Marc's royal authority; and all were
alike unconscious of law, chivalry, or church. The note they sang was
more unlike the note of Christian, if possible, than that of Richard
Wagner; it was the simplest expression of rude and primitive love,
as one could perhaps find it among North American Indians, though

220 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

hardly so defiant even there, and certainly in the Icelandic Sagas
hardly so lawless; but it was a note of real passion, and touched the
deepest chords of sympathy in the artificial society of the twelfth cen-
tury, as it did in that of the nineteenth. The task of the French poet
was to tone it down and give it the fashionable dress, the pointed shoes
and long sleeves, of the time. "The Frenchman," says Gaston Paris,
"is specially interested in making his story entertaining for the society
it is meant for; he is ' social ' ; that is, of the world; he smiles at the ad-
ventures he tells, and delicately lets you see that he is not their dupe;
he exerts himself to give to his style a constant elegance, a uniform
polish, in which a few neatly turned, clever phrases sparkle here and
there; above all, he wants to please, and thinks of his audience more
than of his subject."

In the twelfth century he wanted chiefly to please women, as Orderic
complained; Isolde came out of Brittany to meet Eleanor coming up
from Guienne, and the Virgin from the east; and all united in giving
law to society. In each case it was the woman, not the man, who gave
the law; — it was Mary, not the Trinity; Eleanor, not Louis VII;
Isolde, not Tristan. No doubt, the original Tristan had given the law
like Roland or Achilles, but the twelfth -century Tristan was a compara-
tively poor creature. He was in his way a secondary figure in the ro-
mance, as Louis VII was to Eleanor and Abelard to Heloise. Every
one knows how, about twenty years before Eleanor came to Paris, the
poet-professor Abelard, the hero of the Latin Quarter, had sung to
Heloise those songs which — he tells us — resounded through Europe
as widely as his scholastic fame, and probably to more effect for his
renown. In popular notions H61oise was Isolde, and would in a mo-
ment have done what Isolde did (Bartsch, 107-08) : —

Quaint reis Marcs nus out conjeies When King Marc had banned us both,

E de sa curt nus out chascez, And from his court had chased us forth,

As mains ensemble nus preismes Hand in hand each clasping fast

E hors de la sale en eissimes, Straight from out the hall we passed;

A la forest puis en alasmes To the forest turned our face;

THE THREE QUEENS

221

E un mult bel liu i trouvames
E une roche, fu cavee,
Devant ert estraite la entree,
Dedans fu voesse ben faite,
Xante bel cum se fust purtraite.

Found in it a perfect place,
Where the rock that made a cave
Hardly more than passage gave;
Spacious within and fit for use,
As though it bad been planned for us.

At any time of her life, Heloise would have defied society or church,
and would — at least in the public's fancy — have taken Abelard by
the hand and gone off to the forest much more readily than she went
to the cloister; but Abelard would have made a poor figure as Tristan.
Abelard and Christian of Troyes were as remote as we are from the
legendary Tristan ; but Isolde and Heloise, Eleanor and Mary were the
immortal and eternal woman. The legend of Isolde, both in the earlier
and the later version, seems to have served as a sacred book to the
women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Christian's Isolde
surely helped Mary in giving law to the Court of Troyes and decisions
in the Court of Love.

Countess Mary's authority lasted from 1 164 to 1198, thirty-four
years, during which, at uncertain intervals, glimpses of her influence
flash out in poetry rather than in prose. Christian began his " Roman
de la Charette" by invoking her: —

Puisque ma dame de Chanpaigne
Vialt que romans a faire anpraigne

Si deist et jel tesmoignasse
Que ce est la dame qui passe
Totes celes qui sont vivanz
Si con li funs passe les vanz
Qui vante en Mai ou en Avril

Dirai je: tant com une jame
Vaut de pailes et de sardines
Vaut la contesse de relnes?

Christian chose curious similes. His dame surpassed all living rivals as
smoke passes the winds that blow in May; or as much as a gem would
buy of straws and sardines is the Countess worth in queens. Louis
XIV would have thought that Christian might be laughing at him,
but court styles changed with their masters. Louis XIV would scarcely

222

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

have written a prison-song to his sister such as Richard Coeur-de-Lion
wrote to Mary of Champagne: —

Ja nus hons pris ne dirat sa raison
Adroitement s'ansi com dolans non;
Mais par confort puet il faire chanson.

Moult ai d'amins, mais povre sont li don;

Honte en avront se por ma reangon
Suix ces deus yvers pris.

Ceu sevent bien mi home et mi baron,
Englois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon,
Ke je n'avoie si povre compaingnon

Cui je laissasse por avoir an prixon.

Je nel di pas por nulle retraison,
Mais ancor suiz je pris.

Or sai ge bien de voir certainement
Ke mors ne pris n'ait amin ne parent,
Cant on me lait por or ne por argent.
Moult m'est de moi, mais plus m'est de ma

gent
C'apres ma mort avront reprochier grant
Se longement suiz pris.

N'est pas mervelle se j'ai lo cuer dolent
Cant li miens sires tient ma terre en tor-
ment.
S'or li menbroit de nostre sairement
Ke nos feismes andui communament,
Bien sai de voir ke ceans longement
Ne seroie pas pris.

Ce sevent bien Angevin et Torain,

Cil bacheler ki or sont fort et sain,
C'ancombreis suiz long d'aus en autrui
main.
Forment m'amoient, mais or ne m'aimment

grain.
De belles armes sont ores veut cil plain,
Por tant ke je suix pris.

Mes compaingnons cui j'amoie et cui j'aim,
Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain,
Me di, chanson, kil ne sont pas certain.

No prisoner can tell his honest thought
Unless he speaks as one who suffers wrong;
But for his comfort he may make a song.

My friends are many,but their gifts are naught.

Shame will be theirs, if, for my ransom, here
I lie another year.

They know this well, my barons and my men,
Normandy, England, Gascony, Poitou,
That I had never follower so low

Whom I would leave in prison to my gain.

I say it not for a reproach to them.
But prisoner I ami

The ancient proverb now I know for sure:
Death and a prison know nor kin nor tie,
Since for mere lack of gold they let me lie.

Much for myself I grieve; for them still more.

After my death they will have grievous wrong
If I am prisoner long.

What marvel that my heart is sad and sore
When my own lord torments my helpless

lands!
Well do I know that, if he held his hands,
Remembering the common oath we swore, '
I should not here imprisoned with my song,
Remain a prisoner long.

They know this well who now are rich and
strong
Young gentlemen of Anjou and Touraine,
That far from them,on hostile bonds I strain.

They loved me much, but have not loved me

long.
Their plains will see no more fair lists arrayed,
While I lie here betrayed.

Companions whom I loved, and still do love,
Geoffroi du Perche and Ansel de Caleuz,
Tell them, my song, that they are friend*
untrue.

THE THREE QUEENS

223

C'onques vers aus n'en oi cuer faus ne vain.
S'il me guerroient, il font moult que vilain
Tant com je serai pris.

Comtesse suer, vostre pris soverain
Vos saut et gart dl a cui je me claim

Et par cui je suix pris.
Je n'ou di pas de celi de Chartain

La meire Loweis.

Never to them did I false-hearted prove;
But they do villainy if they war on me,
While I lie here, tmfree.

Countess sister! your sovereign fame
May he preserve whose help I claim,

Victim for whom am I!
I say not this of Chartres' dame.

Mother of Louis 1

Richard's prison-song, one of the chief monuments of English liter-
ature, sounds to every ear, accustomed to twelfth-century verse, as
charming as when it was household rhyme to

mi ome et mi baron
Englois, Normant, Poitevin et Gascon.

Not only was Richard a far greater king than any Louis ever was, but
he also composed better poetry than any other king who is known to
tourists, and, when he spoke to his sister in this cry of the heart
altogether singular among monarchs, he made law and style, above
discussion. Whether he meant to reproach his other sister, Alix of
Chartres, historians may tell, if they know. If he did, the reproach
answered its purpose, for the song was written in 1 193; Richard was
ransomed and released in 1 194; and in 1 198 the young Count "Loweis"
of Chartres and Blois leagued with the Counts of Flanders, Le Perche,
Guines, and Toulouse, against Philip Augustus, in favor of Coeur-de-
Lion to whom they rendered homage. In any case, neither Mary nor
Alice in 1 1 93 was reigning Countess. Mary was a widow since 1 1 8 1 , and
her son Henr^' was Count in Champagne, apparently a great favourite
with his uncle Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The life of this Henry of
Champagne was another twelfth-century romance, but can serve no
purpose here except to recall the story that his mother, the great
Countess Mary, died in 1198 of sorrow for the death of this son, who
was then King of Jerusalem, and was killed, in 1 197, by a fall from the
window of his palace at Acre. Coeur-de-Lion died in 1199. In 120 1,
Mary's other son, who succeeded Henry, — Count Thibaut III, —

224 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

died, leaving a posthumous heir, famous in the thirteenth century as
Thibaut-le-Grand — the Thibaut of Queen Blanche.

They were all astonishing — men and women — and filled the world,
for two hundred years, with their extraordinary energy and genius;
but the greatest of all was old Queen Eleanor, who survived her son
Coeur-de-Lion, as well as her two husbands, — Louis-le-Jeune and
Henry II Plantagenet, — and was left in 1200 still struggling to re-
pair the evils and fend off the dangers they caused. "Queen by the
wrath of God," she called herself, and she knew what just claim she had
to the rank. Of her two husbands and ten children, little remained
except her son John, who, by the unanimous voice of his family, his
friends, his enemies, and even his admirers, achieved a reputation for
excelling in every form of twelfth-century crime. He was a liar and
a traitor, as was not uncommon, but he was thought to be also a coward,
which, in that family, was singular. Some redeeming quality he must
have had, but none is recorded. His mother saw him running, in his
masculine, twelfth-century recklessness, to destruction, and she made
a last and a characteristic effort to save him and Guienne by a treaty
of amity with the French king, to be secured by the marriage of
the heir of France, Louis, to Eleanor's granddaughter, John's niece,
Blanche of Castile, then twelve or thirteen years old. Eleanor herself
was eighty, and yet she made the journey to Spain, brought back the
child to Bordeaux, affianced her to Louis VIII as she had herself been
affianced in 1137 to Louis VII, and in May, 1200, saw her married.
The French had then given up their conventional trick of attributing
Eleanor's acts to her want of morals; and France gave her — as to
most women after sixty years old — the benefit of the convention
which made women respectable after they had lost the opportunity to
be vicious. In French eyes, Eleanor played out the drama according
to the rules. She could not save John, but she died in 1202, before his
ruin, and you can still see her lying with her husband and her son
Richard at Fontevrault in her twelfth-century tomb.

SANTA

THE THREE QUEENS 225

In 1223, Blanche became Queen of France. She was thirty-six
years old. Her husband, LxJuisVHI, was ambitious to rival his father,
Philip Augustus, who had seized Normandy in 1203. Louis undertook
to seize Toulouse and Avignon. In 1225, he set out with a large army
in which, among the chief vassals, his cousin Thibaut of Champagne
led a contingent. Thibaut was five-and-twenty years old, and, like
Pierre de Dreux, then Duke of Brittany, was one of the most brilliant
and versatile men of his time, and one of the greatest rulers. As royal
vassal Thibaut owed forty days' service in the field ; but his interests
were at variance with the King's, and at the end of the term he marched
home with his men, leaving the King to fall ill and die in Auvergne,
November 8, 1226, and a child of ten years old to carry on the govern-
ment as Louis IX.

Chartres Cathedral has already told the story twice, in stone and
glass; but Thibaut does not appear there, although he saved the Queen.
Some member of the royal family must be regent. Queen Blanche
took the place, and of course the princes of the blood, who thought ii
was their right, united against her. At first, Blanche turned violently
on Thibaut and forbade him to appear at the coronation at Rheims
in his own territory', on November 29, as though she held him guilty of
treason ; but when the league of great vassals united to deprive her of
the regency, she had no choice but to detach at any cost any member
of the league, and Thibaut alone offered help. What price she paid
him was best known to her; but what price she would be believed to
have paid him was as well known to her as what had been said of her
grandmother Eleanor when she changed her allegiance in 1 152. If the
scandal had concerned Thibaut alone, she might have been well con-
tent, but Blanche was obliged also to pay desperate court to the papal
legate. Every member of her husband's family united against her and
libelled her character with the freedom which enlivened and envenomed
royal tongues.

t26 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Maintes paroles en dit en
Comme d'Iseult et de Tristan.

Had this been all, she would have cared no more than Eleanor or
any other queen had cared, for in French drama, real or imaginary,
such charges were not very serious and hardly uncomplimentary; but
Iseult had never been accused, over and above her arbitrary views on
the marriage-contract, of acting as an accomplice with Tristan in
poisoning King Marc. French convention required that Thibaut
should have poisoned Louis VIII for love of the Queen, and that
this secret reciprocal love should control their lives. Fortunately for
Blanche she was a devout ally of the Church, and the Church be-
lieved evil only of enemies. The legate and the prelates rallied to her
support and after eight years of desperate struggle they crushed Pierre
Mauclerc and saved Thibaut and Blanche.

For us the poetry is history, and the facts are false. French art
starts not from facts, but from certain assumptions as conventional as
a legendary window, and the commonest convention is the Woman.
The fact, then as now, was Power, or its equivalent in exchange, but
Frenchmen, while struggling for the Power, expressed it in terms of
Art. They looked on life as a drama, — and on drama as a phase of
life — in which the bystanders were bound to assume and accept the
regular stage-plot. That the plot might be altogether untrue to real
life affected in no way its interest. To them Thibaut and Blanche were
bound to act Tristan and Isolde. Whatever they were when off the
stage, they were lovers on it. Their loves were as real and as reason-
able as the worship of the Virgin. Courteous love was avowedly a
form of drama, but not the less a force of society. Illusion for illusion,
courteous love, in Thibaut's hands, or in the hands of Dante and
Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention; — the balance
of trade, the rights of man, or the Athanasian Creed. In that sense
the illusions alone were real; if the Middle Ages had reflected only
what was practical, nothing would have survived for us.

THE THREE QUEENS

227

Thibaut was Tristan, and is said to have painted his vers'ss on the
walls of his chateau. If he did, he painted there, in the opinion of M.
Gaston Paris, better poetry than any that was written on paper or
parchment, for Thibaut was a great prince and great poet who did
in both characters whatever he pleased. In modern equivalents, one
would give much to see the chateau again with the poetry on its walls.
Provins has lost the verses, but Troyes still keeps some churches and
glass of Thibaut's time which hold their own with the best. Even of
Thibaut himself, something survives, and though it were only the
memories of his seneschal, the famous Sire de Joinville, history and
France would be poor without him. With Joinville in hand, you ma^
still pass an hour in the company of these astonishing thirteenth-
century men and women: — crusaders who fight, hunt, make love,
build churches, put up glass windows to the Virgin, buy missals, talk
scholastic philosophy, compose poetry; Blanche, Thibaut, Perron,
Joinville, Saint Louis, Saint Thomas, Saint Dominic, Saint Francis —
you may know them as intimately as you can ever know a world that is
lost; and in the case of Thibaut you may know more, for he is still alive
in his poems; he even vibrates with life. One might try a few verses,
^to see what he meant by courtesy. Perhaps he wrote them for Queen
Blanche, but, to whomever he sent them, the French were right in
thinking that she ought to have returned his love (edition of 1742) : —

Nus horn ne puet ami reconforter

Se cele non ou il a son cuer mis.

Pour ce m'estuet sovent plaindre et plourer

Que nus confers ne me vient, ce m'est vis,

De la ou j'ai tote ma remembrance.

Pour bien amer ai sovent esmaiance

A dire voir.
Dame, merci ! donez moi esperance

De joie avoir.

There is no comfort to be found for pain
Save only where the heart has made its home.
Therefore I can but murmur and complain
Because no comfort to my pain has come
From where I garnered all my happiness.
From true love have I only earned distress

The truth to say.
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess

A hope, one day.

Je ne puis pas sovent a li parler
Ne remirer les biaus iex de son vis.
Ce pois moi que je n'i puis aler
Car ades est mes cuers ententis.

Seldom the music of her voice I hear
Or wonder at the beauty of her eyes.
It grieves me that I may not follow there
Where at her feet my heart attentive lies.

228

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Hoi bele riens, douce sans conoissance,
Car me mettez en millor attendance

De bon espoir!
Dame, merci! donez moi esperance

De joie avoir.

Aucims si sont qui me vuelent blamer
Quant je ne di a qui je suis amis;
Mais ja, dame, ne saura mon penser
Nus qui soit nes fors vous cui je le dis
Couardement a pavours a doutance
Dont puestes vous lors bien a ma semblance

Mon cuer savoir.
Dame, merci! donez moi esperance

De joie avoir.

Oh, gentle Beauty without consciousness.
Let me once feel a moment's hopefulness.

If but one ray!
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess

A hope, one day.

Certain there are who blame upon me throw
Because I will not tell whose love I seek;
But truly, lady, none my thought shall know,
None that is bom, save you to whom I speak
In cowardice and awe and doubtfulness.
That you may happily with fearlessness

My heart essay.
Grace, lady! give me comfort to possess

A hope, one day.

Does Thibaut's verse sound simple? It is the simplicity of the
thirteenth-century glass — so refined and complicated that sensible
people are mostly satisfied to feel, and not to understand. Any blun-
derer in verse, who will merely look at the rhymes of these three stanzas,
will see that simplicity is about as much concerned there as it is with
the windows of Chartres; the verses are as perfect as the colours, and
the versification as elaborate. These stanzas might have been ad-
dressed to Queen Blanche ; now see how Thibaut kept the same tone of
courteous love in addressing the Queen of Heaven!

De grant travail et de petit esploit
Voi ce siegle cargie et encombre
Que tant somes plain de maleurte

Ke nus ne pens a faire ce qu'il doit,
Ains avons si le Deauble trouve

Qu'a lui servir chascuns paine et essaie

Et Diex ki ot pour nos ja cruel plaie
Metons arrier et sa grant dignite;

Molt est hardis qui pour mort ne s'esmaie.

Diex que tout set et tout puet et tout voit

Nous auroit tost en entre-deus giete
Se la Dame plaine de grant bonte
Pudelez lui pour nos ne li prioit

With travail great, and little cargo fraught.

See how our world is labouring in pain;

So filled we are with love of evil gain
That no one thinks of doing what he ought.

But we all hustle in the Devil's train.
And only in his service toil and pray;
And God, who suffered for us agony,

We set behind, and treat him with disdain;
Hardy is he whom death does not dismay.

God who rules all, from whom we can hide
nought.
Had quickly flung us back to nought again
But that our gentle, gracious, Lady Queen
Begged him to spare us, and our pardon
wrought;

THE THREE QUEENS

229

Si tres douc mot plalsant et savoure
Le grant courous dou grant Signour apaie;
Molt par est fox ki autre amor essai

K'en cestui n'a barat ne fausete

Ne es autres n'a ne merd ne manaie.

La souris quiert pour son cors garandir
Centre I'yver la noif et le forment
Et nous chaitif nous n'alons rien querant

Quant nous morrons ou nous puissions garir.

Nous ne cherchons fors k'infer le puant;
Or esgardes come baste sauvage
Pourvoit de loin encontre son domage

Et nous n'avons ne sens ne hardement;
U est avis que plain somes de rage.

Li Deable a getey por nos ravir
Quatre amegons aeschies de torment;
Covoitise lance premierement

Et puis Orguel por sa grant rois emplir
Et Luxure va le bate! trainant

Felonie les goveme et les nage.

Ensi peschant s'en viegnent au rivage

Dont Diex nous gart par son commande-
ment
. En qui sains fons nous feismes homage.

Striving with words of sweetness to restrain
Our angry Lord, and his great wrath allay.
Felon is he who shall her love betray

Which is pure truth, and falsehood cannot
feign,
While all the rest is lie and cheating play.

The feeble mouse, against the winter's cold,
Garners the nuts and grain within his cell.
While man goes groping, without sense to
tell

Where to seek refuge against growing old.
We seek it in the smoking mouth of Hell.

With the poor beast our impotence compare!

See him protect his life with utmost care,
While us nor wit nor courage can compel

To save our souls, so foolish mad we are.

The Devil doth in snares our life enfold;

Four hooks has he with torments baited well;

And first with Greed he casts a mighty spell.
And then, to fill his nets, has Pride enrolled,

And Luxury steers the boat, and fills the sail,
And Perfidy controls and sets the snare;
Thus the poor fish are brought to land, and
there

May God preserve us and the foe repel I

Homage to him who saves us from despair!

A la Dame qui tous les biens avance

T'en va, chanjon s'el te vielt escouter
Onques ne fu nus de millor chaunce.

To Mary Queen, who passes all compare.
Go, little song! to her your sorrows telll
Nor Heaven nor Earth holds happiness so rare*

CHAPTER XII

NICOLETTE AND MARION

C'est d'Aucassins et de Nicolete.

Qui vauroit bons vers oir
Del deport du viel caitif
De deus biax enfans petis
Nicolete et Aucassins;
Des grans paines qu'il soufri
Et des proueces qu'il fist
Por s'amie o le cler vis.
Dox est li cans biax est 11 dis
Et cortois et bien asis.
Nus horn n'est si esbahis
Tant dolans ni entrepris
De grant mal anialadis
Se 11 1'oit ne soit garis
Et de joie resbaudis
Tant par est dou-ce.

This is of Aucassins and Nicolette.

Whom would a good ballad please
By the captive from o'er-seas,
A sweet song in children's praise,
Nicolette and Aucassins;
What he bore for her caress,
What he proved of his prowess
For his friend with the bright face?
The song has charm, the tale has grace,
And courtesy and good address.
No man is in such distress.
Such suffering or weariness.
Sick with ever such sickness,
But he shall, if he hear this,
Recover all his happiness.
So sweet it is!

THIS Httle thirteenth-century gem is called a "chante- fable," a
story partly in prose, partly in verse, to be sung according to
musical notation accompanying the words in the single manuscript
known, and published in facsimile by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon at Oxford
in 1896. Indeed, few poems, old or new, have in the last few years
been more reprinted, translated, and discussed, than "Aucassins,"
yet the discussion lacks interest to the idle tourist, and tells him little.
Nothing is known of the author or his date. The second line alone of-
fers a hint, but nothing more. " Caitif" means in the first place a cap-
tive, and secondly any unfortunate or wretched man. Critics have
liked to think that the word means here a captive to the Saracens, and
that the poet, like Cervantes three or four hundred years later, may
have been a prisoner to the infidels. What the critics can do, we can
do. If liberties can be taken with impunity by scholars, we can take

NICOLETTE AND MARION 231

the liberty of supposing that the poet was a prisoner in the crusade of
Coeur-de-Lion and Philippe- Auguste; that he had recovered his lib-
erty, with his master, in 1194; and that he passed the rest of his life
singing to the old Queen Eleanor or to Richard, at Chinon, and to the
lords of all the chateaux in Guienne, Poitiers, Anjou, and Normandy,
not to mention England. The living was a pleasant one, as the sunny
atmosphere of the Southern poetry proves.

Dox est li cans; biax est li dis,
Et cortois et bien asis.

The poet- troubadour who composed and recited " Aucassins " could not
have been unhappy, but this is the affair of his private life, and not of
ours. What rather interests us is his poetic motive, "courteous love,"
which gives the tale a place in the direct line between Christian of
Troyes, Thibaut-le-Grand, and William of Lorris. Christian of Troyes
died in 1 175; at least he wrote nothing of a later date, so far as is cer-
tainly known. Richard Coeur-de-Lion died in 1 199, very soon after
the death of his half-sister Mary of Champagne. Thibaut-le-Grand
was born in 1201. William of Lorris, who concluded the line of great
"courteous" poets, died in 1260 or thereabouts. For our purposes,
"Aucassins" comes between Christian of Troyes and William of
Lorris; the trouvere or jogleor, who sang, was a " viel caitif " when the
Chartres glass was set up, and the Charlemagne window designed,
about 1210, or perhaps a little later. When one is not a professor, one
has not the right to make inept guesses, and, when one is not a critic,
one should not risk confusing a difficult question by baseless assump-
tions; but even a summer tourist may without offence visit his
churches in the order that suits him best; and, for our tour, "Aucas-
sins" follows Christian and goes hand in hand with Blondel and the
chStelain de Coucy, as the most exquisite expression of "courteous
love." Asoneof "Aucassins' " German editors says in his introduction :
"Love is the medium through which alone the hero surveys the world
around him, and for which he contemns everything that the age

232 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

prized: knightly honour; deeds of arms; father and mother; hell, and
even heaven; but the mere promise by his father of a kiss from
Nicolette inspires him to superhuman heroism; while the old poet
sings and smiles aside to his audience as though he wished them to
understand that Aucassins, a foolish boy, must not be judged quite
seriously, but that, old as he was himself, he was just as foolish about
Nicolette."

Aucassins was the son of the Count of Beaucaire. Nicolette was a
young girl whom the Viscount of Beaucaire had redeemed as a captive
of the Saracens, and had brought up as a god-daughter in his family.
Aucassins fell in love with Nicolette, and wanted to marry her. The
action turned on marriage, for, to the Counts of Beaucaire, as to other
counts, not to speak of kings, high alliance was not a matter of choice
but of necessity, without which they could not defend their lives, let
alone their counties; and, to make Aucassins' conduct absolutely
treasonable, Beaucaire was at that time surrounded and besieged, and
the Count, Aucassins' father, stood in dire need of his son's help. Au-
cassins refused to stir unless he could have Nicolette. What were
honours to him if Nicolette were not to share them. "S'ele estait
empereris de Colstentinoble u d'Alemaigne u roine de France u d'Engle-
tere, si aroit il asses peu en li, tant est f ranee et cortoise et de bon aire
et entecie de toutes bones teces." To be empress of "Colstentinoble"
would be none too good for her, so stamped is she with nobility and
courtesy and high-breeding and all good qualities.

So the Count, after a long struggle, sent for his Viscount and
threatened to have Nicolette burned alive, and the Viscount himself
treated no better, if he did not put a stop to the affair; and the Vis-
count shut up Nicolette, and remonstrated with Aucassins: " Marry a
king's daughter, or a count's! leave Nicolette alone, or you will never
see Paradise ! " This at once gave Aucassins the excuse for a charming
tirade against Paradise, for which, a century or two later, he would
properly have been burned together with Nicolette: —

NICOLETTE AND MARION 233

Enparadisqu'aijeafaire?Jen'iquierentrer In Paradise what have I to do? I do not
mais que j'aie Nicolete, ma tres douce amie, care to go there unless I may have Nicolette,
que j'aim tant. C'en paradis ne vont fors tex my very sweet friend, whom I love so much,
gens con je vous dirai. II i vont ci vie! prestre For to Paradise goes no one but such people as
et cil vieil clop et cil manke, qui tote jour et I will tell you of. There go old priests and old
tote nuit cropent devant ces autex et en ces cripples and the maimed, who all day and all
vies cruutes, et cil a ces vies capes ereses et night crouch before altars and in old crypts,
a ces vies tatereles vestues, qui sont nu et and are clothed with old worn-out capes and
decauc et estrumele, qui moeurent de faim old tattered rags; who are naked and foot-
et d'esci et de froid et de mesaises. Icil vont bare and sore; who die of hunger and want
en paradis; aveuc ciax n'ai jou que faire; mais and misery. These go to Paradise; with them
en infer voil jou aler. Car en infer vont li bel I have nothing to do; but to Hell I am willing
derc et li bel cevalier qui sont mort as tornois to go. For, to Hell go the fine scholars and the
et as rices gueres, et li bien sergant et li franc fair knights who die in tournies and in glorious
home. Aveuc ciax voil jou aler. Et si vont les wars; and the good men-at-arms and the well-
beles dames cortoises que eles ont ii amis ou born. With them I will gladly go. And there
iii avec leurs barons. Et si va li ors et li agens go the fair courteous ladies whether they have
et li vairs et li gris; et si i vont herpeor et two or three friends besides their lords. And
jogleor et li roi del siecle. Avec ciax voil jou the gold and silver go there, and the ermines
aler mais que j'aie Nicolete, ma tres douce and sables; and there go the harpers and jon-
amie, aveuc moi. gleurs, and the kings of the world. With these

will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my
very sweet friend, with me.

Three times, in these short extracts, the word "courteous" has al-
ready appeared. The story itself is promised as "courteous" ; Nicolette
is "courteous"; and the ladies who are not to go to heaven are "cour-
teous." Aucassins is in the full tide of courtesy, and evidently a pro-
fessional, or he never would have claimed a place for harpers and
jongleurs with kings and chevaliers in the next world. The poets of
"courteous love" showed as little interest in religion as the poets of
the eleventh century had shown for it in their poems of war. Aucassins
resembled Christian of Troyes in this, and both of them resembled
Thibaut, while William of Lorris went beyond them all. The literature
of.the "siecle " was always unreligious, from the " Chanson de Roland "
to the "Tragedy of Hamlet"; to be "papelard" was unworthy
of a chevalier; the true knight of courtesy made nothing of defying the
torments of hell, as he defied the lance of a rival, the frowns of so-
ciety, the threats of parents or the terrors of magic; the perfect,

234 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

gentle, courteous lover thought of nothing but his love. Whether the
object of his love were Nicolette of Beaucaire or Blanche of CastilQ
Mary of Champagne or Mary of Chartres, was a detail which did not
afTect the devotion of his worship.

So Nicolette, shut up in a vaulted chamber, leaned out at the marble
window and sang, while Aucassins, when his father promised that he
should have a kiss from Nicolette, went out to make fabulous slaugh.
ter of the enemy; and when his father broke the promise, shut himself
up in his chamber, and also sang; and the action went on by scenes
and interludes, until, one night, Nicolette let herself down from the
window, by the help of sheets and towels, into the garden, and, with
a natural dislike of wetting her skirts which has delighted every
hearer or reader from that day to this, "prist se vesture a I'une main
devant et a I'autre deriere si s'escorga por le rousee qu'ele vit grande
sor I'erbe si s'en ala aval le gardin " ; she raised her skirts with one hand
in front and the other behind, for the dew which she saw heavy on the
grass, and went off down the garden, to the tower where Aucassins was
locked up, and sang to him through a crack in the masonry, and gave
him a lock of her hair, and they talked till the friendly night-watch
came by and warned her by a sweetly-sung chant, that she had better
escape. So she bade farewell to Aucassins, and went on to a breach in
the city wall, and she looked through it down into the fosse which was
very deep and very steep. So she sang to herself —

Peres rois de maeste Father, King of Majesty!

Or ne sai quel part aler. Now I know not where to flee.

Se je vois u gaut rame If I seek the forest free,

Ja me mengeront li le Then the lions will eat me,

Li lions et li sengler Wolves and wild boars terribly,

Dont il i a a plente. Of which plenty there there be.

The lions were a touch of poetic licence, even for Beaucaire, but the
wolves and wild boars were real enough; yet Nicolette feared even
them less than she feared the Count, so she slid down what her au-
dience well knew to be a most dangerous and difficult descent, and

NICOLETTE AND MARION 235

reached the bottom with many wounds in her hands and feet, "et H
san en sail bien en xii lius" ; so that blood was drawn in a dozen places;
and then she climbed up the other side, and went off bravely into the
depths of the forest; an uncanny thing to do by night, as you can still
see.

Then followed a pastoral, which might be taken from the works of
another poet of the same period, whose acquaintance no one can
neglect to make — Adam de la Halle, a Picard, of Arras. Adam lived,
it is true, fifty years later than the date imagined for Aucassins, but
his shepherds and shepherdesses are not so much like, as identical with,
those of the Southern poet, and all have so singular an air of life that
the conventional courteous knight fades out beside them. The poet,
whether bourgeois, professional, noble, or clerical, never much loved
the peasant, and the peasant never much loved him, or any one else.
The peasant was a class by himself, and his trait, as a class, was sus-
picion of everybody and all things, whether material, social, or divine.
Naturally he detested his lord, whether temporal or spiritual, because
the seigneur and the priest took his earnings, but he was never servile,
though a serf; he was far from civil; he was commonly gross. He
was cruel, but not more so than his betters; and his morals were no
worse. The object of oppression on all sides, — the invariable victim,
whoever else might escape, — the French peasant, as a class, held his
own — and more. In fact, he succeeded in plundering Church, Crown,
nobility, and bourgeoisie, and was the only class in French history that
rose steadily in power and well-being, from the time of the crusades to
the present day, whatever his occasional suffering may have been;
and, in the thirteenth century, he was suffering. When Nicolette, on
the morning after her escape, came upon a group of peasants in the
forest, tending the Count's cattle, she had reason to be afraid of them,
but instead they were afraid of her. They thought at first that she was
a fairy. When they guessed the riddle, they kept the secret, though
they risked punishment and lost the chance of reward by protecting

336

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

her. Worse than this, they agreed, for a small present, to give a message
to Aucassins if he should ride that way.

Aucassins was not very bright, but when he got out of prison after
Nicolette's escape, he did ride out, at his friends' suggestion, and tried
to learn what had become of her. Passing through the woods he came
upon the same group of shepherds and shepherdesses: —

Esmeres et Martinet,
Fruelins et Johannes,
Robecons et Aubries, —

who might have been living in the Forest of Arden, so like were they
to the clowns of Shakespeare. They were singing of Nicolette and her
present, and the cakes and knives and flute they would buy with it.
Aucassins jumped to the bait they offered him; and they instantly
began to play him as though he were a trout: —

"Bel enfant, dix vos i ait!"

"Dix vos benie!" fait cil qui fu plus enparles
des autres.

"Bel enfant," fait il, "redites le canfon que
vos disiez ore!"

"Nous n'i dirons," fait cil qui plus fu enparles
des autres. "Dehait ore qui por vos i
camera, biaxsire!"

"Bel enfant!" fait Aucassins, "enne me con-
nissies vos? "

"Oil! nos savions bien que vos estes Aucassins,
nos damoisiax, mais nos ne somes mie a
vos, ains somes au conte."

"Bel enfant, si feres, je vos en pri!"

"Os, por le cuer be!" fait cil. "Por quoi
canteroie je por vos, s'il ne me seoitl
Quant il n'a si rice home en cest pais
sans le core le conte Garin s'il trovait
mes bues ne mes vaces ne mes brebis en
ses pres n'en sen forment qu'il fust mie
tant hardis por les es a crever qu'il les
en ossast cacier. Et por quoi canteroie
je por vos s'il ne me seoit?"

"Se dix vos ait, bel enfant, si feres! et tenes
z sous que j'ai ci en une borsel"

"God bless you, fair child!" said Aucassins.

" God be with you ! " replied the one who talked
best.

"Fair child!" said he, "repeat the song you
were just singing."

"We won't ! " replied he who talked best among
them. "Bad luck to him who shall sing for
you, good sir!"

"Fair child," said Aucassins, "do you know
me?"

"Yes! we know very well that you are Aucas-
sins, our young lord; but we are none of
yours; we belong to the Count."

"Fair child, indeed you'll do it, I pray you!"

"Listen, for love of God!" said he. "Why
should I sing for you if it does not suit
me? when there is no man so powerful in
this country, except Count Garin, if he
found my oxen or my cows or my sheep
in his pasture or his close, would not rather
risk losing his eyes than dare to turn them
out! and why should I sing for you, if it
does not suit me!"

"So God help you, good child, indeed you
will do it! and take these ten sous that
I have here in my purse. "

NICOLETTE AND MARION 237

"Sire les deniers prenderons nos, mais je ne "Sire, the money we will take, but I'll not

vos canterai mie, car j'en ai jure. Mais sing to you, for I've sworn it. But I

je le vos conterai se vos voles." will tell it you, if you like."

"De par diu!" fails Aucassins. "Encore aim "For God's sake!" said Aucassins; "better

je mix conter que nient." telling than nothing! "

Ten sous was no small gift ! twenty sous was the value of a strong
ox. The poet put a high money-value on the force of love, but he set
a higher value on it in courtesy. These boors were openly insolent to
their young lord, trying to extort money from him, and threatening
him with telling his father; but they were in their right, and Nicolette
was in their power. At heart they meant Aucassins well, but they were
rude and grasping, and the poet used them in order to show how love
made the true lover courteous even to clowns. Aucassins' gentle cour-
tesy is brought out by the boors' greed, as the colours in the window
were brought out and given their value by a bit of blue or green. The
poet, having got his little touch of colour rightly placed, let the peas-
ants go. " Cil qui fu plus enparles des autres," having been given his
way and his money, told Aucassins what he knew of Nicolette and her
message; so Aucassins put spurs to his horse and cantered into the
forest, singing: —

Se diu plaist le pere fort So please God, great and strong,

Je vos reverai encore I will find you now ere long,

Suer, douce a-mie! Sister, sweet friend I

But the peasant had singular attraction for the poet. Whether the
character gave him a chance for some clever mimicry, which was one of
his strong points as a story-teller: or whether he wanted to treat his
subjects, like the legendary windows, in pairs; or whether he felt that
the forest-scene specially amused his audience, he immediately intro-
duced a peasant of another class, much more strongly coloured, or
deeply shadowed. Every one in the audience was — and, for that
matter, still would be — familiar with the great forests, the home of
r^lf the fairy and nursery tales of Europe, still wild enough and
extensive enough to hide in, although they have now comparatively

238 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

few lions, and not many wolves or wild boars or serpents such as Nico-
lette feared. Every one saw, without an effort, the young damoiseau
riding out with his hound or hawk, looking for game; the lanes under
the trees, through the wood, or the thick underbrush before lanes were
made; the herdsmen watching their herds, and keeping a sharp look-
out for wolves; the peasant seeking lost cattle; the black kiln-men
burning charcoal ; and in the depths of the rocks or swamps or thickets
— the outlaw. Even now, forests like Rambouillet, or Fontainebleau
or Compiegne are enormous and wild ; one can see Aucassins breaking
his way through thorns and branches in search of Nicolette, tearing
his clothes and wounding himself "en xl lius u en xxx," until evening
approached, and he began to weep for disappointment: —

L esgarda devant lui enmi la voie si vit un As he looked before him along the way he

vallet tel que je vos dirai. Grans estoit et saw a man such as I will tell you. Tall he was,

mervellex et lais et hidex. II avoit une grande and menacing, and ugly, and hideous. He had

hure plus noire qu'une carbouclee, et avoit a great mane blacker than charcoal and had

plus de planne paume entre ii ex, et avoit unes more than a full palm-width between his two

grandes joes et un grandisme nez plat, et une eyes, and had big cheeks, and a huge flat nose

grans narines lees et unes grosses levres plus and great broad nostrils, and thick lips redder

rouges d'unes carbounees, et uns grans dens than raw beef, and large ugly yellow teeth, and

gaunes et lais et estoit caucies d'uns housiax was shod with hose and leggings of raw hide

et d'uns soUers de buef fretes de tille dusque laced with bark cord to above the knee, and was

deseure le genol et estoit af ules d'une cape a muffled in a cloak without lining, and was lean-

ii envers si estoit apoiies sor une grande mague. ing on a great club. Aucassins came upon him

Aucassins s'enbati sor lui s'eut grand paor suddenly, and had great fear when he saw him.
quant il le sorvit. . . .

"Baix frere, dix ti aitl" "Fair brother, good day!" said he.

"Dix vos benie!" fait cil. "God bless you!" said the other.

"Se dix fait, que fais tu ilec?" "As God help you, what do you here?"

"A vos que monte?" fait cil. "What is that to you?" said the other.

"Nient!" fait Aucassins; "jenel vos demant "Nothing!" said Aucassins; "I ask only

se por bien non." from good-will."

"Mais pour quoi ploures vos?" fait cil, "But why are you crying!" said the other,

"et faites si fait doel? Certes se j'estoie ausi "and mourning so loud? Sure, if I were as

rices horn que vos estes, tos li mons ne me great a man as you are, nothing on earth would

feroit mie plorer." make me cry."

"Ba! me conissies vos!" fait Aucassins. "Bah! you know me?" said Aucassins.

"Die! je sai bien que vos estes Aucassins "Yes, I know very well that you are Aucas-

li fix le conte, et se vos me dites por quoi vos sins, the count's son: and if you will tell me

plores je vos dirai que je fac id." what you are crj'ing for. I will tell you what

I am doing here."

NICOLETTE AND MARION

239

Aucassins seemed to think this an equal bargain. All damoiseaux
were not as courteous as Aucassins, nor all "varlets" as rude as his
peasants; we shall see how the young gentlemen of Picardy treated
the peasantry for no offence at all; but Aucassins carried a softer,
Southern temper in a happier climate, and, with his invariable gentle
courtesy, took no offence at the familiarity with which the ploughman
treated him. Yet he dared not tell the truth, so he invented, on the
spur of the moment, an excuse; — he has lost, he said, a beautiful
white hound. The peasant hooted —

"Osl" fait cil; "por le cuer que cU sires eut "Listen!" said he; "By the heart God had

en sen ventre! que vos plorastes por un cien in his body! that you should cry for a stinking

puant! Mai dehait ait qui ja mais vos prisera dog! Bad luck to him who ever prizes youl

quant il n'a si rice home en ceste tere se vos When there is no man in this land so great, if

peres Ten mandoit x u rv u xx qu'il ne les your father sent to him for ten or fifteen or

envoyast trop volontiers et s'en esteroit trop twenty, but would fetch them very gladly,

lies. Mais je dois plorer et dol faire?" and be only too pleased. But I ought to cry

and mourn."

"Et tu de quoi frere?" "And why you, brother?"

"Sire, je le vos dirai! J'estoie hues a un rice "Sir, I will tell you. I was hired out to a

vilain si cacoie se came, iiii hues i avoit. Or a rich fanner to drive his plough. There were four

iii jors qu'il m'avint une grande malaventure oxen. Now three days ago I had a great mis-

que je perdi le mellor de mes hues Roget le mel- fortune, for I lost the best of my oxen, Roget,

lor de me carue. Si le vols querant. Si ne the best of my team. I am looking to find him.

mengai ne ne hue iii jors a passes. Si n'os aler I 've not eaten or drunk these three days past,

a le vile c'on me metroit en prison que je ne I dare n't go to the town, for they would put

I'ai de quoi saure. De tot I'avoir du monde me in prison, as I've nothing to pay with. In

n'ai je plus vaillant que vos vees sor le cors all the world I 've not the worth of anything

de mi. Une lasse mere avoie; si n'avoit plus but what you see on my body. I 've a poor old

vaillant que une keutisele; si li a on sacie de mother who owned nothing but a feather mat-

desous le dos; si gist a pur I'estrain; si m'en tress, and they've dragged it from under her

poise asses plus que demi. Car avoirs va et back, so she lies on the bare straw; and she

vient; se j'ai or perdu je gaaignerai une autre troubles me more than myself. For riches

fois; si sorrai mon buef quant je porrai, ne ja come and go; if I lose to-day, I gain to-morrow;

por cou n'en plorerai. Et vos plorastes por I will pay for my ox when I can, and will not

\m cien de longaigne! Mai dehait ait qui mais cry for that. And you cry for a filthy dog ! Bad

vos prisera!" luck to him who ever thinks well of you!"

"Certes tu es de bon confort, biax frere! "Truly, you counsel well, good brother!

quebenoissois tu! Et que valoittes hues!" God bless you! And what was your ox worth? "

"Sire, XX sous m'en demande on, je n'en
puis mie abatre une seule maille."

"Or, tien," fait Aucassins, "xx que j'ai d
en me borse; si sol ten buef!"

"Sir, they ask me twenty sous for it. I
cannot beat them down a single centime."

"Here are twenty," said Aucassins, "that
I have in my purse! Pay for your ox! "

240

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

"Sirel" fait fl, "grans mercies! et dix vos "Sir!" said he; "many thanks! and Goi
laist trover ce que vox queresl" grant you find what you seek!"

The little episode was thrown in without rhyme or reason to the
rapid emotion of the love-story, as though the jongleur were showing
his own cleverness and humour, at the expense of his hero, as jon-
gleurs had away of doing; but he took no such liberties with his hero-
ine. While Aucassins tore through the thickets on horseback, crying
aloud, Nicolette had built herself a little hut in the depths of the
forest: —

Ele prist des flors de lis
Et de I'erbe du garris
Et de le foille autresi;
Une belle loge en fist,
Ainques tant gente ne vi.
Jure diu qui ne menti
Se par la vient Aucassins
Et il per I'amor de li
Ne si repose un petit
Ja ne sera ses amis
N'ele s'a-mie.

So she twined the lilies' flower,
Roofed with leafy branches o'er,
Made of it a lovely bower,
With the freshest grass for floor,
Such as never mortal saw.
By God's Verity, she swore.
Should Aucassins pass her door,
And not stop for love of her.
To repose a moment there,
He should be her love no more,
Nor she his dear!

So night came on, and Nicolette went to sleep, a little distance
away from her hut. Aucassins at last came by, and dismounted, sprain-
ing his shoulder in doing it. Then he crept into the little hut, and lying
on his back, looked up through the leaves to the moon, and sang: —

Estoilete, je te voi,
Que la lune trait a soi.
Nicolete est aveuc toi,
M'amiete o le blond poil.
Je quid que dix le veut avoir
Por la lumiere de soir
Que par li plus clere soit.
Vien, amie, je te proiel
Ou monter vauroie droit,
Que que fust du recaoir.
Que fuisse lassus o toi
Ja te baiseroi estroit.
Se j'estoie fix a roi
S'afieries vos bien a mo!
Suer douce amie!

I can see you, little star,
That the moon draws through the air.
Nicolette is where you are,
My own love with the blonde hair.
I think God must want her near
To shine down upon us here
That the evening be more clear.
Come down, dearest, to my prayer,
Or I climb up where you are!
Though I fell, I would not care.
If I once were with you there
I would kiss you closely, dear!
If a monarch's son I were
You should all my kingdom share.
Sweet friend, sister!

NICOLETTE AND MARION

241

How Nicolette heard him sing, and came to him and rubbed his
shoulder and dressed his wounds as though he were a child ; and how
in the morning they rode away together, like Tennyson's "Sleeping
Beauty," —

O'er the hills and far away
Beyond their utmost purple rim,
Beyond the night, beyond the day,

singing as they rode, the story goes on to tell or to sing in verse —

Aucassins, li biax, li blons,
Li gentix, li amorous,
Est issous del gaut parfont,
Entre ses bras ses amors
Devant lui sor son arfon.
Les ex li baise et le front,
Et le bouce et le menton.
EUe I'a mis a raison.
"Aucassins, biax amis dox,
"En quel tere en irons nous?"
"Douce amie, que sai jou?
" Moi ne caut u nous aillons,
" En forest u en destor
"Mais que je soie aveuc vous."
Passent les vaus et les mens,
Et les viles et les bors
A la mer vinrent au jor,
Si descendent u sablon
Les le rivage.

Aucassins, the brave, the fair.
Courteous knight and gentle lover,
From the forest dense came fon.h;
In his arms his love he bore
On his saddle-bow before;
Her eyes he kisses and her mouth,
And her forehead and her chin.
She brings him back to earth again:
"Aucassins, my love, my own,
"To what country shall we turn?"
"Dearest angel, what say you?
"I care nothing where we go,
"In the forest or outside,
"While you on my saddle ride."
So they pass by hill and dale.
And the city, and the town.
Till they reach the morning pale.
And on sea-sands set them down,
Hard by the shore.

There we will leave them, for their further adventures have not
much to do with our matter. Like all the romans, or nearly all, "Au-
cassins" is singularly pure and refined. Apparently the ladies of cour-
teous love frowned on coarseness and allowed no licence. Their
power must have been great, for the best romans are as free from
grossness as the "Chanson de Roland" itself, or the church glass, or
the illuminations in the manuscripts; and as long as the power of the
Church ruled good society, this decency continued. As far as women
were concerned, they seem always to have been more clean than the
men, except when men painted them in colours which men liked best.

242 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Perhaps society was actually cleaner in the thirteenth century than
in the sixteenth, as Saint Louis was more decent than Francis I, and
as the bath was habitual in the twelfth century and exceptional at
the Renaissance. The rule held good for the bourgeoisie as well as
among the dames cortoises. Christian and Thibaut, " Aucassins" and
the " Roman de la Rose," may have expressed only the tastes of high-
born ladies, but other poems were avowedly bourgeois, and among the
bourgeois poets none was better than Adam de la Halle. Adam wrote
also for the court, or at least for Robert of Artois, Saint Louis's nephew,
whom he followed to Naples in 1284, but his poetry was as little aristo-
cratic as poetry could well be, and most of it was cynically — almost
defiantly — middle-class, as though the weavers of Arras were his
only audience, and recognized him and the objects of his satire in every
verse. The bitter personalities do not concern us, but, at Naples, to
amuse Robert of Artois and his court, Adam composed the first of
French comic operas, which had an immense success, and, as a pas-
toral poem, has it still. The Idyll of Arras was a singular contrast to
the Idyll of Beaucaire, but the social value was the same in both;
Robin and Marion were a pendant to Aucassins and Nicolette; Robin
was almost a burlesque on Aucassins, while Marion was a Northern,
energetic, intelligent, pastoral Nicolette.

"Li Gieus de Robin et de Marion" had little or no plot. Adam
strung together, on a thread of dialogue and by a group of suitable
figures, a number of the favourite songs of his time, followed by the
favourite games, and ending with a favourite dance, the "tresca."
The songs, the games, and the dances do not concern us, but the dia-
logue runs along prettily, with an air of Flemish realism, like a picture
of Teniers, as unlike that of "courtoisie" as Teniers was to Guido
Reni. Underneath it all a tone of satire made itself felt, good-natured
enough, but directed wholly against the men.

The scene opens on Marion tending her sheep, and singing the pretty
air: "Robin m'^aime, Robin ma'a," after which enters a chevalier or

NICOLETTE AND MARION 243

esquire, on horseback, and sings: " Je me repairoie du toumoiement."
Then follows a dialogue between the chevalier and Marion, with no
other'object than to show off the charm of Marion against the masculine
defects of the knight. Being, like most squires, somewhat slow of ideas
in conversation with young women, the gentleman began by asking
for sport for his falcon. Has she seen any duck down by the river?

Mais veis tu par chi devant
Vers ceste riviere nul ane?

"Ane," it seems, was the usual word for wild duck, the falcon's prey,
and Marion knew it as well as he, but she chose to misunderstand
him: —

C'est une bete qui recane;
J 'en vis ier iii sur chc quemln,
Tous quarchies aler au moulin.
Est che chou que vous demandes?

"It is a beast that brays; I saw three yesterday on the road, all with
loads going to the mill. Is that what you ask? " That is not what the
squire has asked, and he is conscious that Marion knows it, but he
tries again. If she has not seen a duck, perhaps she has seen a heron : —

Hairons, sire? par me foi, noni
Je n'en vi nesun puis quareme
Que j'en vi mengier dues dame Erne
Me taiien qui sont ches brebis.

"Heron, sir! by my faith, no! I've not seen one since Lent when I
saw some eaten at my grandmother's — Dame Emma who owns these
sheep." "Hairons," it seems, meant also herring, and this wilful mis-
understanding struck the chevalier as carrying jest too far: —

Par foi! or suis j'ou esbaubisll
N'ainc mais je ne fui si gabesi

"On my word, I am silenced! never in my life was I so chaffed!"
Marion herself seems to think her joke a little too evident, for she takes
up the conversation in her turn, only to conclude that she likes Robin

244 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

better than she does the knight; he is gayer, and when he plays his
musette he starts the whole village dancing. At this, the squire makes
a declaration of love with such energy as to spur his horse almost
over her: —

Aimi, sire! ostez vo chevall
A poi que il ne m'a blechie.
Li Robin ne regiete mie
Quand je voie apres se karue.

"Aimi!" is an exclamation of alarm, real or affected: "Dear me, sir!
take your horse away! he almost hurt me! Robin's horse never rears
when I go behind his plough!" Still the knight persists, and though
Marion still tells him to go away, she asks his name, which he says
is Aubert, and so gives her the catchword for another song: — " Vos
perdes vo paine, sire Aubert!" — which ends the scene with a duo.

The second scene begins with a duo of Marion and Robin, followed
by her giving a softened account of the chevalier's behaviour, and then
they lunch on bread and cheese and apples, and more songs follow,
till she sends him to get Baldwin and Walter and Peronette and the
pipers, for a dance. In his absence the chevalier returns and becomes
very pressing in his attentions, which gives her occasion to sing : — ■

J'oi Robin flagoler
Au flagol d'argent.

When Robin enters, the knight picks a quarrel with him for not
handling properly the falcon which he has caught in the hedge; and
Robin gets a severe beating. The scene ends by the horseman carrying
off Marion by force; but he soon gets tired of carrying her against her
will, and drops her, and disappears once for all.

Certes voirement sui je beste
Quant a ceste beste m'areste.
Adieu, bergiere!

B§te the knight certainly was, and was meant to be, in order to
give the necessary colour to Marion's charms. Chevaliers were seldom

NICOLETTE AND MARION

245

intellectually brilliant in the mediaeval romans, and even the "Chan-
sons de Geste" liked better to talk of their prowess than of their wit;
but Adam de la Halle, who felt no great love for chevaliers, was not
satisfied with ridiculing them in order to exalt Marion ; his second act
was devoted to exalting Marion at the expense of her own boors.

The first act was given up to song; the second, to games and dances.
The games prove not to be wholly a success; Marion is bored by them,
and wants to dance. The dialogue shows Marion trying constantly to
control her clowns and make them decent, as Blanche of Castile had
been all her life trying to control her princes, and Mary of Chartres
her kings. Robin is a rustic counterpart to Thibaut. He is tamed by
his love of Marion, but he has just enough intelligence to think well
of himself, and to get himself into trouble without knowing how to
get out of it. Marion loves him much as she would her child ; she makes
only a little fun of him; defends him from the others; laughs at his
jealousy; scolds him on occasion; flatters his dancing; sends him on
errands, to bring the pipers or drive away the wolf; and what is most
to our purpose, uses him to make the other peasants decent. Walter
and Baldwin and Hugh are coarse, and their idea of wit is to shock
the women or make Robin jealous. Love makes gentlemen even of
boors, whether noble or villain, is the constant moral of mediaeval
story, and love turns Robin into a champion of decency. When, at
last, Walter, playing the jongleur, begins to repeat a particularly
coarse fabliau, or story in verse, Robin stops him short —

Ho, Gautier, je n'en voeil plus! fil
Dites, seres vous tous jours teusi
Vous estes un ors menestreusl

"Ho, Walter! I want no more of that: Shame! Say! are you going to
be always like that? You're a dirty beggar!" A fight seems inevitable,
but Marion turns it into a dance, and the whole party, led by the
pipers, with Robin and Marion at the head of the band, leave the stage
in the dance which is said to be still known in Italy as the "tresca."

246 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Marion is in her way as charming as Nicolette, but we are less in-
terested in her charm than in her power. Always the woman appears
as the practical guide; the one who keeps her head, even in love: —

EUe I'a mis a raison:
"Aucassins, biax amis doz,

En quele tere en irons nous?"
"Douce amie, que sai jou?

Moi ne caut ou nous aillons."

The man never cared ; he was always getting himself into crusades, or
feuds, or love, or debt, and depended on the woman to get him out.
The story was always of Charles VII and Jeanne d'Arc, or Agnes
Sorel. The woman might be the good or the evil spirit, but she was
always the stronger force. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were
a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since have
they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such intelli-
gence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of history, —
these Plantagenets; these scholastic philosophers; these architects of
Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and Robin Hoods and Marco
Polos; these crusaders, who planted their enormous fortresses all over
the Levant ; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield har-
vests;— all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the
woman.

Explain it who will! We are not particularly interested in the
explanation; it is the art we have chased through this French forest,
like Aucassins hunting for Nicolette; and the art leads always to the
woman. Poetry, like the architecture and the decoration, harks back
to the same standard of taste. The specimens of Christian of Troyes,
Thibaut, Tristan, Aucassins, and Adam de la Halle were mild admissions
of feminine superiority compared with some that were more in vogue.
If Thibaut painted his love-verses on the walls of his castle, he put
there only what a more famous poet, who may have been his friend,
set on the walls of his Ch&teau of Courteous Love, which, not being

NICOLETTE AND MARION 247

made with hands or with stone, but merely with verse, has not wholly
perished. The " Roman de la Rose " is the end of true mediaeval poetry
and goes with the Sainte-Chapelle in architecture, and three hundred
years of more or less graceful imitation or variation on the same themes
which followed. Our age calls it false taste, and no doubt our age is
right; — every age is right by its own standards as long as its standards
amuse it; — but after all, the " Roman de la Rose" charmed Chaucer,
— it may well charm you. The charm may not be that of Mont-Saint-
Michel or of Roland; it has not the grand manner of the eleventh
century, or the jewelled brilliancy of the Chartres lancets, or the
splendid self-assertion of the roses: but even to this day it gives out
a faint odour of Champagne and Touraine, of Provence and Cyprus.
One hears Thibaut and sees Queen Blanche.

Of course, this odour of true sanctity belongs only to the " Roman"
of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche and
of all good things, about 1250; a short allegory of courteous love in
forty-six hundred and seventy lines. To modern taste, an allegory of
forty-six hundred and seventy lines seems to be not so short as it
might be; but the fourteenth century found five thousand verses
totally inadequate to the subject, and, about 1300, Jean de Meung
added eighteen thousand lines, the favourite reading of society for
one or two hundred years, but beyond our horizon. The " Roman" of
William of Lorris was complete in itself; it had shape; beginning,
middle, and end; even a certain realism, action, — almost life!

The Rose is any feminine ideal of beauty, intelligence, purity, or
grace, — always culminating in the Virgin, — but the scene is the
Court of Love, and the action is avowedly in a dream, without time or
place. The poet's tone is very pure; a little subdued; at times sad; and
the poem ends sadly; but all the figures that were positively hideous
were shut out of the court, and painted on the outside walls: —
Hatred; Felony; Covetousness; Envy; Poverty; Melancholy, and
Old Age. Death did not appear. The passion for representing death in

248

mont-saint-micHel and chartres

its horrors did not belong to the sunny atmosphere of the thirteenth
century, and indeed jarred on French taste always.though the Church
came to insist on it; but Old Age gave the poet a motive more artistic,
foreshadowing Death, and quite sad enough to supply the necessary
contrast. The poet who approached the walls of the chateau and saw,
outside, all the unpleasant facts of life conspicuously posted up, as
though to shut them out of doors, hastened to ask for entrance, and,
when once admitted, found a court of ideals. Their names matter
little. In the mind of William of Lorris, every one would people his
ideal world with whatever ideal figures pleased him, and the only
personal value of William's figures is that they represent what he
thought the thirteenth-century ideals of a perfect society. Here is
Courtesy, with a translation long thought to be by Chaucer: —

Apres se tenoit Cortoisie

Qui moult estoit de tous prisie.

Si n'ere orgueilleuse ne fole.

C'est cele qui a la karole,

La soe merci, m'apela,

Ains que nule, quand je vins la.

Et ne fut ne nice n'umbrage,

Mais sages auques, sans outrage,

De biaus respons et de biaus dis,

One nus ne fu par li laidis,

Ne ne porta nului rancuae,

Et fu clere comme la lune

Est avers les autres estoiles

Qui ne resemblent que chandoiles.

Faitisse estoit et avenant;

Je ne sai fame plus plaisant.

Ele ert en toutes cors bien digne

D'estre empereris ou roine.

And next that daunced Courtesye,

That preised was of lowe and hye,

For neither proude ne foole was she;

She for to daunce called me,

I pray God yeve hir right good grace.

When I come first into the place.

She was not nyce ne outrageous,

But wys and ware and vertuous;

Of faire speche and of faire answere;

Was never wight mysseid of her,

Ne she bar rancour to no wight.

Clere browne she was, and thereto bright

Of face, of body avenaunt.
I wot no lady so pleasaunt.
She were worthy forto bene
An empresse or crowned queue.

You can read for yourselves the characters, and can follow the
simple action which owes its slight interest only to the constant effort
of the dreamer to attain his ideal, — the Rose, — and owes its charm
chiefly to the constant disappointment and final defeat. An under-
tone of sadness runs through it, felt already in the picture of Time

NICOLETTE AND MARION

249

which foreshadows the end of Love — the Rose
with it the end of hope: —

• and her court, and

Li tens qui s'en va nuit et jor,
Sans repos prendre et sans sejor,
Et qui de nous se part et emble
Si celeement qu'il nous semble
Qu'il s'arreste ades en un point,
Et il ne s'i arreste point,
Ains ne fine de trespasser.
Que nus ne puet neis penser
Quex tens ce est qm est presens;
S'el demandes as clers lisans,
Aincois que Ten I'eust pense
Seroit il ja trois tens passe;
Li tens qui ne puet sejoumer,
Ains vait tons jors sans retorner,
Com I'iaue qui s'avale toute,
N'il n'en retourne arriere goute;
Li tens vers qui noient ne dure,
Ne fer ne chose tant soit dure,
Car il gaste tout et menjue;
Li tens qui tote chose mue,
Qui tout fait croistre et tout norist,
Et qui tout use et tout porrist.

The tyme that passeth nyght and daye.

And restelesse travayleth aye,

And steleth from us so prively.

That to us semeth so sykerly

That it in one poynt dwelleth never,

But gothe so fast, and passeth aye

That there nys man that thynke may
What tyme that now present is;
Asketh at these clerkes this,
For or men thynke it readily
Thre tymes ben ypassed by.
The tyme that may not sojoume
But goth, and may never returne.
As water that down renneth ay.
But never drope retoiime may.
There may no thing as time endure,
Metall nor earthly creature:
For alle thing it frette and shall.
The tyme eke that chaungith all,
And all doth waxe and fostered be,
And alle thing distroieth he.

The note of sadness has begun, which the poets were to find so
much more to their taste than the note of gladness. From the "Roman
de la Rose" to the "Ballade des Dames du Temps jadis" was a short
step for the Middle- Age giant Time, — a poor two hundred years.
Then Villon woke up to ask what had become of the Roses: —

Ou est la tres sage Helols
Pour qui fut chastie puis mojTie,
Pierre Esbaillart a Saint Denis?
Pour son amour ot cest essoyne.

Et Jehanne la bonne Lorraine
Qu' Englois brulerent a Rouan;
Ou sont elles, \'ierge Souvraine?
Mais ou sont les neiges dantan?

Where is the virtuous H61o!se,
For whom suflcred, then turned monk,
Pierre Abfilard at Saint -Denis?
For his love he bore that pain.

And Jeanne d'Arc, the good Lorraine,
Whom the English burned at Rouenl
Where are they, Virgin Queen?
But where are the snows of spring?

Between the death of William of Lorris and the advent of John of
Meung, a short half-century (1250-1300), the Woman and the Rose

250 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

became bankrupt. Satire took the place of worship. Man, with his
usual monkey-like malice, took pleasure in pulling down what he had
built up. The Frenchman had made what he called "fausse route."
William of Lorris was first to see it, and say it, with more sadness and
less bitterness than Villon showed ; he won immortality by telling how
he, and the thirteenth century in him, had lost himself in pursuing his
Rose, and how he had lost the Rose, too, waking up at last to the dull
memory of pain and sorrow and death, that "tout porrist." The world
had still a long march to make from the Rose of Queen Blanche to the
guillotine of Madame du Barry; but the " Roman de la Rose" made
epoch. For the first time since Constantine proclaimed the reign of
Christ, a thousand years, or so, before Philip the Fair dethroned Him,
the deepest expression of social feeling ended with the word: Despair.

CHAPTER XIII

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio,
Umile ed alta piu che creatura,
Termine fisso d'eterno consiglio,

Tu sei colei che I'umana natura
Nobilitasti si, che il suo fattore
Non disdegno di farsi sua fattura. . . ,

La tua benignita non pur soccorre
A chi dimanda, ma molte fiate
Liberamente al dimandar precorre.

In te misericordia, in te pietate,
In te magnificenza, in te s'aduna
Quantunque in creatura e di bontate.

Vergine bella, che di sol vestita,
Coronata di stelle, al sommo sole
Piacesti si che'n te sua luce ascose;
Amor mi spinge a dir di te parole;
Ma non so 'ncominciar senza tu aita,
E di colui ch'amando in te si pose.
Invoco lei che ben sempre rispose
Chi la chiamo con fede.
Vergine, s'a mercede
Miseria estrema dell' umane cose
Giammai ti volse, al mio prego t'inchinal
Soccorri alia mia guerra,
Bench'i sia terra, e tu del ciel reginal

DANTE composed one of these prayers; Petrarch the other.
Chaucer translated Dante's prayer in the "Second Nonnes
Tale." He who will may undertake to translate either; — not I! The
Virgin, in whom is united whatever goodness is in created being, might
possibly, in her infinite grace, forgive the sacrilege; but her power has
limits, if not her grace; and the whole Trinity, with the Virgin to aid,
had not the power to pardon him who should translate Dante and
Petrarch. The prayers come in here, not merely for their beauty, —
although the Virgin knows how beautiful they are, whether man knows
it or not; but chiefly to show the good faith, the depth of feeling, the
intensity of conviction, with which society adored its ideal of human
perfection.

The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of
the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to
her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of
the illusion which men thought they thought their existence. The
twelfth and thirteenth centuries believed in the supernatural, and

252 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

might almost be said to have contracted a miracle-habit, as morbid as
any other form of artificial stimulant; they stood, like children, in an
attitude of gaping wonder before the miracle of miracles which they felt
in their own consciousness; but one can see in this emotion, which is,
after all, not exclusively infantile, no special reason why they should
have so passionately flung themselves at the feet of the Woman rather
than of the Man. Dante wrote in 1300, after the height of this emotion
had passed ; and Petrarch wrote half a century later still ; but so slowly
did the vision fade, and so often did it revive, that, to this day, it re-
mains the strongest symbol with which the Church can conjure.

Men were, after all, not wholly inconsequent; their attachment to
Mary rested on an instinct of self-preservation. They knew their own
peril. If there was to be a future life, Mary was their only hope. She
alone represented Love. The Trinity were, or was, One, and could, by
the nature of its essence, administer justice alone. Only childlike illu-
sion could expect a personal favour from Christ. Turn the dogma
as one would, to this it must logically come. Call the three Godheads
by what names one liked, still they must remain One; must administer
one justice; must admit only one law. In that law, no human weakness
or error could exist; by its essence it was infinite, eternal, immutable.
There was no crack and no cranny in the system, through which
human frailty could hope for escape. One was forced from corner
to corner by a remorseless logic until one fell helpless at Mary's
feet.

Without Mary, man had no hope except in atheism, and for athe-
ism the world was not ready. Hemmed back on that side, men rushed
like sheep to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too
happy in finding protection and hope in a being who could understand
the language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer. How pas-
sionately they worshipped Mary, the Cathedral of Chartres shows; and
how this worship elevated the whole sex, all the literature and history
of the time proclaim. If you need more proof, you can read more

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 253

Petrarch; but still one cannot realize how actual Mary was, to the men
and women of the Middle Ages, and how she was present, as a matter
of course, whether by way of miracle or as a habit of life, throughout
their daily existence. The surest measure of her reality is the enor-
mous money value they put on her assistance, and the art that was
lavished on her gratification, but an almost equally certain sign is
the casual allusion, the chance reference to her, which assumes her
presence.

The earliest prose writer in the French language, who gave a picture
of actual French life, was Joinville; and although he wrote after the
death of Saint Louis and of William of Lorris and Adam de la Halle,
in the full decadence of Philip the Fair, toward 1300, he had been a
vassal of Thibaut and an intimate friend of Louis, and his memories
went back to the France of Blanche's regency. Born in 1224, he must
have seen in his youth the struggles of Thibaut against the enemies of
Blanche, and in fact his memoirs contain Blanche's emphatic letter for-
bidding Thibaut to marry Yolande of Brittany. He knew Pierre de
Dreux well, and when they were captured by the Saracens at Damietta,
and thrown into the hold of a galley, " I had my feet right on the face
of the Count Pierre de Bretagne, whose feet, in turn, were by my
face." Joinville is almost twelfth-century in feeling. He was neither
feminine nor sceptical, but simple. He showed no concern for poetry,
but he put up a glass window to the Virgin. His religion belonged to
the "Chanson de Roland." When Saint Louis, who had a pleasant
sense of humour, put to him his favourite religious conundrums, Join-
ville affected not the least hypocrisy. "Would you rather be a leper
or commit a mortal sin?" asked the King. "I would rather commit
thirty mortal sins than be a leper," answered Joinville. " Do you wash
the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday?" asked the King. "God for-
bid!" replied Joinville; "never will I wash the feet of such creatures!"
Saint Louis mildly corrected his, or rather Thibaut's, seneschal, for
these impieties, but he was no doubt used to them, for the soldier was

254 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

never a churchman. If one asks Joinville what he thinks of the Virgin,
he answers with the same frankness: —

Ung jour moi estant devant le roi lui demanday congie d'aller en pelerinage a
nostra Dame de Tourtouze [Tortosa in Syria] qui estoit ung veage tres fort requis.
Et y avoit grant quantite de pelerins par chacun jour pour ce que c'est le premier
autel qui onques fust fait en I'onneur de la Mere de Dieu ainsi qu'on disoit lors.
Et y faisoit nostre Dame de grans miracles a merveilles. Entre lesquelz elle en
fist ung d'un pouvre homme qui estoit hors de son sens et demoniacle. Car il
avoit le maling esperit dedans le corps. Et advint par ung jour qu'il fut amene
a icelui autel de nostre Dame de Tourtouze. Et ainsi que ses amys qui I'avoient
la amene prioient a nostre Dame qu'elle lui voulsist recouvrer sante et guerison
le diable que la pouvre creature avoit ou corps respondit: "Nostre Dame n'est
pas ici ; elle est en Egipte pour aider au Roi de France et aux Chrestiens qui au-
jourdhui arrivent en la Terre sainte contre toute paiennie qui sont a cheval." Et
fut mis en escript le jour que le deable profera ces motz et fut apporte au legat
qui estoit avecques le roi de France ; lequel me dist depuis que a celui jour nous
estion arrivez en la terre d'Egipte. Et suis bien certain que la bonne Dame Marie
nous y eut bien besoin.

This happened in Syria, after the total failure of the crusade in
Egypt. The ordinary man, even if he were a priest or a soldier, needed
a miraculous faith to persuade him that Our Lady or any other divine
power, had helped the crusades of Saint Louis. Few of the usual fic-
tions on which society rested had ever required such defiance of facts;
but, at least for a time, society held firm. The thirteenth century could
not afford to admit a doubt. Society had staked its existence, in this
world and the next, on the reality and power of the Virgin; it had in-
vested in her care nearly its whole capital, spiritual, artistic, intellec-
tual, and economical, even to the bulk of its real and personal estate;
and her overthrow would have been the most appalling disaster the
Western world had ever known. Without her, the Trinity itself could
not stand ; the Church must fall ; the future world must dissolve. Not
even the collapse of the Roman Empire compared with a calamity so
serious; for that had created, not destroyed, a faith.

If sceptics there were, they kept silence. Men disputed and doubted
about the Trinity, but about the Virgin the satirists Rutebeuf and

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 255

Adam de la Halle wrote in the same spirit as Saint Bernard and Ab6-
lard, Adam de Saint- Victor and the pious monk Gaultier de Coincy.
In the midst of violent disputes on other points of doctrine, the dis-
putants united in devotion to Mary; and it was the single redeeming
quality about them. The monarchs believed almost more implicitly
than their subjects, and maintained the belief to the last. Doubtless
the death of Queen Blanche marked the flood- tide at its height; but
an authority so established as that of the Virgin, founded on instincts
so deep, logic so rigorous, and, above all, on wealth so vast, declined
slowly. Saint Louis died in 1270. Two hundred long and dismal years
followed, in the midst of wars, decline of faith, dissolution of the old
ties and interests, until, toward 1470, Louis XI succeeded in restoring
some semblance of solidity to the State; and Louis XI divided his time
and his money impartially between the Virgin of Chartres and the
Virgin of Paris. In that respect, one can see no difference between him
and Saint Louis, nor much between Philippe de Commines and Join-
ville. After Louis XI, another fantastic century passed, filled with the
foulest horrors of history — religious wars; assassinations; Saint Bar-
tholomews; sieges of Chartres; Huguenot leagues and sweeping destruc-
tion of religious monuments; Catholic leagues and fanatical reprisals on
friends and foes, — the actual dissolution of society in a mass of horrors
compared with which even the Albigensian crusade was a local accident,
all ending in the reign of the last Valois, Henry III, the weirdest, most
fascinating, most repulsive, most pathetic and most pitiable of the whole
picturesque series of French kings. If you look into the Journal of Pierre
de I'Estoile, under date of January 26, 1582, you can read the entry: —

The King and the Queen [Louise de Lorraine], separately, and each accom-
panied by a good troop [of companions] went on foot from Paris to Chartres on
a pilgrimage [voyage] to Notre-Dame-de-dessous-Terre [Our Lady of the Crypt],
where a neuvaine was celebrated at the last mass at which the King and Queen
assisted, and oflFered a silver-gilt statue of Notre Dame which weighed a hundred
marks [eight hundred ounces], with the object of having lineage which might suc-
ceed to the throne.

256 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

In the dead of winter, in robes of penitents, over the roughest roads,
on foot, the King and Queen, then seven years married, walked fifty
miles to Chartres to supplicate the Virgin for children, and back again;
and this they did year after year until Jacques C16ment put an end to
it with his dagger, in 1589, although the Virgin never chose to per-
form that miracle; but, instead, allowed the House of Valois to die out
and sat on her throne in patience while the House of Bourbon was
anointed in their place. The only French King ever crowned in the
presence of Our Lady of Chartres was Henry IV — a heretic.

The year 1589, which was so decisive for Henry IV in France, marked
in England the rise of Shakespeare as a sort of stage-monarch. While
in France the Virgin still held such power that kings and queens asked
her for favours, almost as instinctively as they had done five hundred
years before, in England Shakespeare set all human nature and all
human history on the stage, with hardly an allusion to the Virgin's
name, unless as an oath. The exceptions are worth noting as a matter
of curious Shakespearean criticism, for they are but two, and both are
lines in the "First Part of Henry VI," spoken by the Maid of Or-
leans: —

Christ's mother helps me, else I were too weakl

Whether the " First Part of Henry VI " was written by Shakespeare at
all has been a doubt much discussed, and too deep for tourists; but
that this line was written by a Roman Catholic is the more likely be-
cause no such religious thought recurs in all the rest of Shakespeare's
works, dramatic or lyric, unless it is implied in Gaunt's allusion to "the
world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son." Thus, while three hundred years
caused in England the disappearance of the great divinity on whom the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries had lavished all their hopes, and during
these three centuries every earthly throne had been repeatedly shaken
or shattered, the Church had been broken in halves, faith had been lost,
and philosophies overthrown, the Virgin still remained and remains the

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 257

most intensely and the most widely and the most personally felt, of
all characters, divine or human or imaginary, that ever existed among
men. Nothing has even remotely taken her place. The only possible
exception is the Buddha, Sakya Muni; but to the Western mind, a
figure like the Buddha stood much farther away than the Virgin. That
of the Christ even to Saint Bernard stood not so near as that of his
mother. Ab^lard expressed the fact in its logical necessity even more
strongly than Saint Bernard did : —

Te requirunt vota fidelium,
Ad te corda suspirant omnium,
Tu spes nostra post Deum unica,
Advocata nobis es posita.
Ad judicis matrem confugiunt,
Qui judicis iram effugiunt,
Quae praecari pro eis cogitur,
Quae pro reis mater eflBdtur.

"After the Trinity, you are our only hope"; spes nostra unica; "you
are placed there as our advocate; all of us who fear the wrath of the
Judge, fly to the Judge's mother, who is logically compelled to sue for
us, and stands in the place of a mother to the guilty." Ab^lard's logic
was always ruthless, and the "cogitur" is a stronger word than one
would like to use now, with a priest in hearing. We need not insist on
it; but what one must insist on, is the good faith of the whole people,
— kings, queens, princes of all sorts, philosophers, poets, soldiers, ar-
tists, as well as of the commoners like ourselves, and the poor, — for
the good faith of the priests is not important to the understanding,
since any class which is sufficiently interested in believing will always
believe. In order to feel Gothic architecture in the twelfth and thir-
teenth centuries, one must feel first and last, around and above and
beneath it, the good faith of the public, excepting only Jews and athe-
ists, permeating every portion of it with the conviction of an imme-
diate alternative between heaven and hell, with Mary as the only
court in equity capable of overruling strict law.
The Virgin was a real person, whose tastes, wishes, instincts,

258 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

passions, were intimately known. Enough of the Virgin's literature
survives to show her character, and the course of her daily life. We
know more about her habits and thoughts than about those of earthly
queens. The "Miracles de la Vierge" make a large part, and not the
poorest part, of the enormous literature of these two centuries, al-
though the works of Albertus Magnus fill twenty-one folio volumes
and those of Thomas Aquinas fill more, while the " Chemsons de Geste"
and the "Romans," published or unpublished, are a special branch of
literature with libraries to themselves. The collection of the Virgin's
miracles put in verse by Gaultier de Coincy , monk, prior, and poet, be-
tween 1214 and 1233, — the precise moment of the Chartres sculpture
and glass, — contains thirty thousand lines. Another great collection,
narrating especially the miracles of the Virgin of Chartres, was made
by a priest of Chartres Cathedral about 1240. Separate series, or single
tales, have appeared and are appearing constantly, but no general col-
lection has ever been made, although the whole poetic literature of the
Virgin could be printed in the space of two or three volumes of scho-
lastic philosophy, and if the Church had cared half as truly for the Virgin
as it has for Thomas Aquinas, every miracle might have been collected
and published a score of times. The miracles themselves, indeed, are
not very numerous. In Gaultier de Coincy's collection they number
only about fifty. The Chartres collection relates chiefly to the horrible
outbreak of what was called leprosy — the "mal ardent," — which
ravaged the north of France during the crusades, and added intensity
to the feelings which brought all society to the Virgin's feet. Recent
scholars are cataloguing and classifying the miracles, as far as they
survive, and have reduced the number within very moderate limits.
As poetry Gaultier de Coincy's are the best.

Of Gaultier de Coincy and his poetry, Gaston Paris has something
to say which is worth quoting: —

It is the most curious, and often the most singular monument of the infantile
piety of the Middle Ages. Devotion to Mary is presented in it as a kind of intal-

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 259

lible guarantee not only against every sort of evil, but also against the most legiti-
mate consequences of sin and even of crime. In these stories which have revolted
the most rational piety, as well as the philosophy of modern times, one must stili
admit a gentle and penetrating charm; a naivete ; a tenderness and a simplicity of
heart, which touch, while they raise a smile. There, for instance, one sees a sick
monk cured by the milk that Our Lady herself comes to invite him to draw from
her "douce mamelle"; a robber who is in the habit of recommending himself to
the Virgin whenever he is going to "embler," is held up by her white hands for
three days on the gibbet where he is hung, until the miracle becomes evident,
and procures his pardon; an ignorant monk who knows only his Ave Maria, and is
despised on that account, when dead reveals his sanctity by five roses which come
out of his mouth in honour of the five letters of the name Maria; a nun, who haS'
quitted her convent to lead a life of sin, returns after long years, and finds that the
Holy Virgin, to whom, in spite of all, she has never ceased to offer every day her
prayer, has, during all this time, filled her place as sacristine, so that no one has
perceived her absence.

Gaston Paris inclined to apologize to his "bons bourgeois de Paris"
for reintroducing to them a character so doubtful as the Virgin Mary,
but, for our studies, the professor's elementary morality is eloquent.
Clearly, M. Paris, the highest academic authority in the world,
thought that the Virgin could hardly, in his time, say the year 1900,
be received into good society in the Latin Quarter. Our own English
ancestors, known as Puritans, held the same opinion, and excluded her
from their society some four hundred years earlier, for the same reasons
which affected M. Gaston Paris. These reasons were just, and showed
the respectability of the citizens who held them. In no well-regulated
community, under a proper system of police, could the Virgin feel at
home, and the same thing may be said of most other saints as well as
sinners. Her conduct was at times undignified, as M. Paris complained.
She condescended to do domestic service, in order to help her friends,
and she would use her needle, if she were in the mood, for the same
object. The "Golden Legend" relates that: —

A certain priest, who celebrated every day a mass in honour of the Holy
Virgin, was brought up before Saint Thomas of Canterbury who suspended him
from his charge, judging him to be short-witted and irresponsible. Now Saint

26o MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Thomas had occasion to mend his hair-cloth shirt, and while waiting for an oppor-
tunity to do so, had hidden it under his bed; so the Virgin appeared to the priest
and said to him: "Go find the archbishop and tell him that she, for love of whom
you celebrated masses, has herself mended his shirt for him which is under his
bed; and tell him that she sends you to him that he may take off the interdict he
has imposed on you." And Saint Thomas found that his shirt had in fact been
mended. He relieved the priest, begging him to keep the secret of his wearing a
hair-shirt.

Mary did some exceedingly unconventional things, and among them
the darning Thomas A'Becket's hair-shirt, and the supporting a robber
on the gibbet, were not the most singular, yet they seem not to have
shocked Queen Blanche or Saint Francis or Saint Thomas Aquinas so
much as they shocked M. Gaston Paris and M. Prudhomme. You have
still to visit the cathedral at Le Mans for the sake of its twelfth-cen-
tury glass, and there, in the lower panel of the beautiful, and verj'
early, window of Saint Protais, you will see the full-length figure of a
man, lying in bed, under a handsome blanket, watching, with staring
eyes, the Virgin, in a green tunic, wearing her royal crown, who is
striking him on the head with a heavy hammer and with both hands.
The miracle belongs to local history, and is amusing only to show
how little the Virgin cared for criticism of her manners or acts. She was
above criticism. She made manners. Her acts were laws. No one
thought of criticizing, in the style of a normal school, the will of such
a queen; but one might treat her with a degree of familiarity, under
great provocation, which would startle easier critics than the French.
Here is an instance : —

A widow had an only child whom she tenderly loved. On hearing that this son
had been taken by the enemy, chained, and put in prison, she burst into tears, and
addressing herself to the Virgin, to whom she was especially devoted, she asked
her with obstinacy for the release of her son; but when she saw at last that her
prayers remained unanswered, she went to the church where there was a sculp-
tured image of Mary, and there, before the image, she said: "Holy Virgin, I have
begged you to deliver my son, and you have not been willing to help an unhappy
mother! I 've implored your patronage for my son, and you have refused it! Very
good! just as my son has been taken away from me, so I am going to take away

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 261

yours, and keep him as a hostage!" Saying this, she approached, took the statue
child on the Virgin's breast, carried it home, wrapped it in spotless linen, and
locked it up in a box, happy to have such a hostage for her son's return. Now,
the following night, the Virgin appeared to the young man, opened his prison
doors, and said: "Tell your mother, my child, to return me my Son now that I
have returned hers!" The young man came home to his mother and told her of
his miraculous deliverance; and she, overjoyed, hastened to go with the little
Jesus to the Virgin, saying to her: " I thank you, heavenly lady, for restoring me
my child, and in return I restore yours!"

For the exactness of this story in all its details, Bishop James of
Voragio could not have vouched, nor did it greatly matter. What he
could vouch for was the relation of intimacy and confidence between
his people and the Queen of Heaven. The fact, conspicuous above all
other historical certainties about religion, that the Virgin was by es-
sence illogical, unreasonable and feminine, is the only fact of any ulti-
mate value worth studying, and starts a number of questions that his-
tory has shown itself clearly afraid to touch. Protestant and Catholic
differ little in that respect. No one has ventured to explain why the
Virgin wielded exclusive power over poor and rich, sinners and saints,
alike. Why were all the Protestant churches cold failures without her
help? Why could not the Holy Ghost — the spirit of Love and Grace

— equally answer their prayers? Why was the Son powerless? Why was
Chartres Cathedral in the thirteenth century — like Lourdes to-day

— the expression of what is in substance a separate religion? Why did
the gentle and gracious Virgin Mother so exasperate the Pilgrim
Father? Why was the Woman struck out of the Church and ignored in
the State? These questions are not antiquarian or trifling in historical
value; they tug at the very heart-strings of all that makes whatever
order is in the cosmos. If a Unity exists, in which and toward which all
energies centre, it must explain and include Duality, Diversity, In-
finity— Sex!

Although certain to be contradicted by every pious churchman, a
heretic must insist on thinking that the Mater Dolorosa was the logical
Virgin of the Church, and that the Trinity would never have raised

262 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

her from the foot of the Cross, had not the Virgin of Majesty been
imposed, by necessity and public unanimity, on a creed which was
meant to be complete without her. The true feeHng of the Church was
best expressed by the Virgin herself in one of her attested miracles:
"A clerk, trusting more in the Mother than in the Son, never stopped
repeating the angelic salutation for his only prayer. Once as he said
again the 'Ave Maria,' the Lord appeared to him, and said to him:
' My Mother thanks you much for all the Salutations that you make
her; but still you should not forget to salute me also: tamen et me
salutare memento.' " The Trinity feared absorption in her, but was
compelled to accept, and even to invite her aid, because the Trinity
was a court of strict law, and, as in the old customary law, no process
of equity could be introduced except by direct appeal to a higher
power. She was imposed unanimously by all classes, because what
man wanted most in the Middle Ages was not merely law or equity,
but also and particularly favour. Strict justice, either on earth or in
heaven, was the last thing that society cared to face. All men were
sinners, and had, at least, the merit of feeling that, if they got their
deserts, not one would escape worse than whipping. The instinct of
individuality went down through all classes, from the count at the top,
to the jugleors and menestreus at the bottom. The individual rebelled
against restraint; society wanted to do what it pleased; all disliked
the laws which Church and State were trying to fasten on them. They
longed for a power above law, — or above the contorted mass of ig-
norance and absurdity bearing the name of law; but the power which
they longed for was not human, for humanity they knew to be cor-
rupt and incompetent from the day of Adam's creation to the day of
the Last Judgment. They were all criminals; if not, they would have
had no use for the Church and very little for the State; but they had
at least the merit of their faults; they knew what they were, and, like
children, they yearned for protection, pardon, and love. This was
what the Trinity, though omnipotent, could not give. Whatever the

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

263

heretic or mystic might try to persuade himself, God could not be Love.
God was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection; He could not be human
and imperfect, nor could the Son or the Holy Ghost be other than the
Father. The Mother alone was human, imperfect, and could love; she
alone was Favour, Duality, Diversity. Under any conceivable form
of religion, this duality must find embodiment somewhere, and the
Middle Ages logically insisted that, as it could not be in the Trinity,
either separately or together, it must be in the Mother. If the Trinity
was in its essence Unity, the Mother alone could represent whatever
was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this
was the whole human race. The saints alone were safe, after they were
sainted. Every one else was criminal, and men differed so little in de-
gree of sin that, in Mary's eyes, all were subjects for her pity and help.
This general rule of favour, apart from law, or the reverse of law,
was the mark of Mary's activity in human affairs. Take, for an ex-
ample, an entire class of her miracles, applying to the discipline of the
Church! A bishop ejected an ignorant and corrupt priest from his
living, as all bishops constantly had to do. The priest had taken the
precaution to make himself Mary's man; he had devoted himself to her
. service and her worship. Mary instantly interfered, — just as Queen
Eleanor or Queen Blanche would have done, — most unreasonably,
and never was a poor bishop more roughly scolded by an orthodox
queen! "Moult airieement," very airily or angrily, she said to him
(Bartsch, 1887, p. 363): —

Ce saches tu certainement
Se tu li matinet Men main
Ne rapeles mon chapelain
A son servise et a s'enor,
L'ame de toi a desenoF
Ains trente jors departira
Et es dolors d'infer ira.

Now know you this for sure and true.
Unless to-morrow this you do,
— And do it very early too, —
Restore my chaplain to his due,
A much worse fate remains for you I
Within a month your soul shall go
To suffer in the flames below.

The story-teller — himself a priest and prior — caught the lofty
trick of manner which belonged to the great ladies of the court, and

264 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

was inherited by them, even in England, down to the time of Queen
Elizabeth, who treated her bishops also like domestic servants; —
" matinet bien main! " To the public, as to us, the justice of the rebuke
was nothing to the point; but that a friend should exist on earth or in
heaven, who dared to browbeat a bishop, caused the keenest personal
delight. The legends are clearer on this point than on any other. The
people loved Mary because she trampled on conventions ; not merely
because she could do it, but because she liked to do what shocked every
well-regulated authority. Her pity had no limit.

One of the Chartres miracles expresses the same motive in language
almost plainer still. A good-for-nothing clerk, vicious, proud, vain,
rude, and altogether worthless, but devoted to the Virgin, died, and
with general approval his body was thrown into a ditch (Bartsch,
1887, p. 369): —

Mais cele ou sort tote pities
Tote douceurs tote amisties
Et qui les siens onques n'oublie
Son pecheor n'oblia mie.

"Her sinner!" Mary would not have been a true queen unless she
had protected her own. The whole morality of the Middle Ages stood
in the obligation of every master to protect his dependent. The herds-
men of Count Garin of Beaucaire were the superiors of their damoiseau
Aucassins, while they felt sure of the Count. Mary was the highest of
all the feudal ladies, and was the example for all in loyalty to her own,
when she had to humiliate her own Bishop of Chartres for the sake of
a worthless brute. " Do you suppose it does n't annoy me, ' ' she said,
"to see my friend buried in a common ditch? Take him out at once!
I command ! tell the clergy it is my order, and that I will never forgive
them unless to-morrow morning without delay, they bury my friend
in the best place in the cemetery!": —

Cuidies vos done qu'il ne m'enuit
Quant vos I'aves si adosse
Que mis I'aves en un fosse?

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 265

Metes Ten fore je le comanti

Di le clergie que je li mantl

Ne me puet mi repaier

Se le matin sans delayer

A grant heneur n'est mis amis

Ou plus beau leu de I'aitre mis.

Naturally, her order was instantly obeyed. In the feudal regime,
disobedience to an order was treason — or even hesitation to obey —
when the order was serious; very much as in a modern army, disobedi-
ence is not regarded as conceivable. Mary's wish was absolute law,
on earth as in heaven. For her, other laws were not made. Intensely
human, but always Queen, she upset, at her pleasure, the decisions of
every court and the orders of every authority, human or divine; inter-
fered directly in the ordeal; altered the processes of nature; abolished
space; annihilated time. Like other queens, she had many of the fail-
ings and prejudices of her humanity. In spite of her own origin, she
disliked Jews, and rarely neglected a chance to maltreat them. She was
not in the least a prude. To her, sin was simply humanity, and she
seemed often on the point of defending her arbitrary acts of mercy,
by frankly telling the Trinity that if the Creator meant to punish man.
He should not have made him. The people, who always in their hearts
protested against bearing the responsibility for the Creator's arbitrary
creations, delighted to see her upset the law, and reverse the rulings of
the Trinity. They idolized her for being strong, physically and in will,
so that she feared nothing, and was as helpful to the knight in the
melee of battle as to the young mother in child-bed. The only char-
acter in which they seemed slow to recognize Mary was that of bour-
geoise. The bourgeoisie courted her favour at great expense, but she
seemed to be at home on the farm, rather than in the shop. She had
very rudimentary knowledge, indeed, of the principles of political econ-
omy as we understand them, and her views on the subject of money-
lending or banking were so feminine as to rouse in that powerful class
a vindictive enmity which helped to overthrow her throne. On the

266

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

other hand, she showed a marked weakness for chivalry, and one of her
prettiest and most twelfth-century miracles is that of the knight who
heard mass while Mary took his place in the Hsts. It is much too
charming to lose (Bartsch, 1895, p. 311): —

Un chevalier courtois et sages,

Hardis et de grant vasselages,

Nus mieudres en chevalerie,

Moult amoit la vierge Marie.

Pour son bamage demener

Et son franc cors d'armes pener,

Aloit a son toumoiement

Gamis de son contentement.

Au dieu plaisir ainsi avint

Que quant le jour du toumoi vint

II se hastoit de chevauchier,

Bien vousist estre en champ premier.

D'une eglise qui pres estoit

Oi les sains que Ton sonnoit

Pour la sainte messe chanter.

Le chevalier sans arrester

S'en est ale droit a I'eglise

Pour escouter le dieu servise.

L'en chantoit tantost hautement

Une messe devotement

De la sainte Vierge Marie;

Puis a on autre comencie.

Le chevalier vien I'escouta,

De bon cuer la dame pria,

Et quant la messe fut finee

La tierce fu recomenciee

Tantost en ce meisme lieu.

"Sire, pour la sainte char dieul"

Ce li a dit son escuier,

"L'heure passe de toumoier,

Et vous que demourez ici?

Venez vous en, je vous en pril

Volez vous devenir hermite

Ou papelart ou ypocrite?

Alons en a nostre mestier!"

A knight both courteous and wise
And brave and bold in enterprise.
No better knight was ever seen.
Greatly loved the Virgin Queen.
Once, to contest the tourney's prize
And keep his strength in exercise,
He rode out to the listed field
Armed at all points with lance and shield;
But it pleased God that when the day
Of tourney came, and on his way
He pressed his charger's speed apace
To reach, before his friends, the place.
He saw a church hard by the road
And heard the church-bells sounding loud
To celebrate the holy mass.
Without a thought the church to pass
The knight drew rein, and entered there
To seek the aid of God in prayer.

High and dear they chanted then

A solemn mass to Mary Queen;

Then afresh began again.

Lost in his prayers the good knight stayed;

With all his heart to Mary prayed;

And, when the second one was done,

Straightway the third mass was begim.

Right there upon the self-same place.

"Sire, for mercy of God's grace!"

Wliisf)ered his squire in his ear;

" The hour of tournament is near;

Why do you want to linger here?

Is it a hermit to become,

Or hypocrite, or priest of Rome?

Come on, at once! despatch your prayer!

Let us be off to our affair!"

The accent of truth still lingers in this remonstrance of the squire,
who must, from all time, have lost his temper on finding his chevalier
addicted to "papelardie" when he should have been fighting; but the

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 267

priest had the advantage of telling the story and pointing the moral.
This advantage the priest neglected rarely, but in this case he used it
with such refinement and so much literary skill that even the squire
might have been patient. With the invariable gentle courtesy of the
true knight, the chevalier replied only by soft words : —

"Amis!" ce dist li chevalier,
" Cil toumoie moult noblement
Qui le servise dieu entent. "

In one of Milton's sonnets is a famous line which is commonly
classed among the noblest verses of the English language : —

"They also serve, who only stand and wait."

Fine as it is, with the simplicity of the grand style, like the "Chanson
de Roland" the verse of Milton does not quite destroy the charm of
thirteenth-century diction : —

"Friend!" said to him the chevalier,
"He tourneys very nobly too,
Who only hears God's service through!"

No doubt the verses lack the singular power of the eleventh century; it
is not worth while to pretend that any verse written in the thirteenth
century wholly holds its own against "Roland": —

"Sire cumpain! faites le vus de gred?
Ja est CO Rollanz ki tant vos soelt amer!"

The courtesy of Roland has the serious solidity of the Romanesque
arch, and that of Lancelot and Aucassins has the grace of a legendary
window; but one may love it, all the same; and one may even love the
knight, — papelard though he were, — as he turned back to the altar
and remained in prayer until the last mass was ended.

Then they mounted and rode on toward the field, and of course
you foresee what had happened. In itself the story is bald enough, but
it is told with such skill that one never tires of it. As the chevalier
and the squire approached the lists, they met the other knights return-
ing, for the jousts were over; but, to the astonishment of the chevalier,

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MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

he was greeted by all who passed him with shouts of applause for his
marvellous triumph in the lists, where he had taken all the prizes and
all the prisoners: —

Les chevaliers ont encontrez,
Qui du tournois sont retoumes,
Qui du tout en tout est feru.
S'en avoit tout le pris eu
Le chevalier qui reperoit
Des messes qu' oies avoit.
Les autres qui s'en reperoient
Le saluent et le conjoient
Et distrent bien que onques mes
Nul chevalier ne prist tel fes
D'armes com il ot fet ce jour;
A tousjours en avroit I'onnour.
Moult en i ot qui se rendoient
A lui prisonier, et disoient
' Nous somes vostre prisonier,
Ne nous ne pourrions nier,
Ne nous aiez par armes pris."
Lors ne fu plus oil esbahis,
Car il a entendu tantost
Que cele fu pour lui en I'ost
Pour qui il fu en la chapelle.

His friends, returning from the fight.
On the way there met the knight,
For the jousts were whoUy run,
And all the prizes had been won
By the knight who had not stirred
From the masses he had heard.
All the knights, as they came by,
Saluted him and gave him joy.
And frankly said that never yet
Had any knight performed such feat.
Nor ever honour won so great
As he had done in arms that day;
While many of them stopped to say
That they all his prisoners were:
"In truth, your prisoners we are:
We cannot but admit it true:
Taken we were in arms by you!"
Then the truth dawned on him there.

And all at once he saw the light,
That She, by whom he stood in prayer,

— The Virgin, — stood by him in fight!

The moral of the tale belongs to the best feudal times. The knight
at once recognized that he had become the liege-man of the Queen,
and henceforth must render his service entirely to her. So he called his
"barons," or tenants, together, and after telling them what had hap-
pened, took leave of them and the "si^cle": —

" Moult est ciest toumoiement biaux

Ou ele a pour moi tournoie;

Mes trop I'avroit mal emploie

Se pour lui je ne tournoioie!

Fox seroie se retoumoie

A la mondaine vanite.

A dieu promet en verite

Que James ne tournoierai

Fors devant le juge verai

Qui conoit le bon chevalier

Et selonc le fet set jutgier."

" Glorious has the tourney been

Where for me has fought the Queen;

But a disgrace for me it were

If I tourneyed not for her.

Traitor to her should I be,

Returned to worldly vanity.

I promise truly, by God's grace,

Never again the lists to see,

Except before that Judge's face,

Who knows the true knight from the base,

And gives to each his final place."

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

269

Lore prent congie piteusement,
Et maint en plorent tenrement.
D'euls se part, en une abaie
Servi puis la vierge Marie.

Then piteously he takes his leave
While in tears his barons grieve.
So he parts, and in an abbey
Serves henceforth the Virgin Mary.

Observe that in this case Mary exacted no service! Usually the
legends are told, as in this instance, by priests, though they were told in
the same spirit by laymen, as you can see in the poems of Rutebeuf,
and they would not have been told very differently by soldiers, if one
may judge from Joinville; but commonly the Virgin herself prescribed
the kind of service she wished. Especially to the young knight who
had, of his own accord, chosen her for his liege, she showed herself
as exacting as other great ladies showed themselves toward their
Lancelots and Tristans. When she chose, she could even indulge in
more or less coquetry, else she could never have appealed to the sym-
pathies of the thirteenth-century knight-errant. One of her miracles
told how she disciplined the young men who were too much in the
habit of assuming her service in order to obtain selfish objects, A
youthful chevalier, much given to tournaments and the other worldly
diversions of the siecle, fell in love, after the rigorous obligation of his
class, as you know from your Dulcinea del Toboso, with a lady who, as
was also prescribed by the rules of courteous love, declined to listen to
him. An abbot of his acquaintance, sympathizing with his distress,
suggested to him the happy idea of appealing for help to the Queen
of Heaven. He followed the advice, and for an entire year shut him-
self up, and prayed to Mary, in her chapel, that she would soften the
heart of his beloved, and bring her to listen to his prayer. At the end
of the twelvemonth, fixed as a natural and sufficient proof of his ear-
nestness in devotion, he felt himself entitled to indulge again in inno-
cent worldly pleasures, and on the first morning after his release, he
started out on horseback for a day's hunting. Probably thousands of
young knights and squires were always doing more or less the same
thing, and it was quite usual that, as they rode through the fields or

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MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

forests, they should happen on a solitary chapel or shrine, as this
knight did. He stopped long enough to kneel in it and renew his
prayer to the Queen : —

La mere dieu qui maint chetil
A retrait de chetivete
Par sa grant debonnairte
Par sa courtoise courtoisie
Au las qui tant I'apele et prie
Ignelement s'est demonstree,
D'une coronne corrormee
Plaine de pierres precieuses
Si flamboianz si precieuses
Pour pou li euil ne li esluisent.
Si netement ainsi reluisent
Et resplendissent com la raie
Qui en este au matin raie.
Tant par a bel et cler le vis
Que buer f u mez, ce li est vis,
Qui s'i puest assez mirer.
" Cele qui te fait soupirer
Et en si grant erreur t'a mis,"
Fait nostre dame, " biau douz amis.
Est ele plus bele que moi? "
Li chevaliers a tel effroi
De la clarte, ne sai que face;
Ses mains giete devant sa face;
Tel hide a et tel freeur
Chaoir se laisse de freeur;
Mais cele en qui pitie est toute
Li dist: "Amis, or n'aies doute!
Je suis cele, n'en doute mie,
Qui te doi faire avoir t'amie.
Or prens garde que tu feras.
Cele que tu miex ameras
De nous ii auras a amie."

God's Mother who to many a wretch
Has brought relief from wretchedness.
By her infinite goodness.
By her courteous courteousness,
To her suppliant in distress
Came from heaven quickly down;
On her head she bore the crown,
Full of precious stones and gems
Darting splendour, flashing flames,
Till the eye near lost its sight
In the keenness of the light,
As the summer morning's sun
Blinds the eyes it shines upon.
So beautiful and bright her face,
Only to look on her is grace.

" She who has caused you thus to sigh,
And has brought you to this end," —
Said Our Lady, — "Tell me, friend.
Is she handsomer than I? "
Scared by her brilliancy, the knight
Knows not what to do for fright;
He clasps his hands before his face.
And in his shame and his disgrace
Falls prostrate on the ground with fear;
But she with pity ever near
Tells him: — "Friend, be not afraid!
Doubt not that I am she whose aid
Shall surely bring your love to you;
But take good care what you shall do!
She you shall love most faithfully
Of us two, shall your mistress be."

One is at a loss to imagine what a young gentleman could do, in
Such a situation, except to obey, with the fewest words possible, the
suggestion so gracefully intended. Queen's favours might be fatal
gifts, but they were much more fatal to reject than to accept. What-
ever might be the preferences of the knight, he had invited his own fate,

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

271

and in consequence was fortunate to be allowed the option of dying
and going to heaven, or dying without going to heaven. Mary was
not always so gentle with young men who deserted or neglected her
for an earthly rival ; — the offence which irritated her most, and occa-
sionally caused her to use language which hardly bears translation
into modern English. Without meaning to assert that the Queen
of Heaven was jealous as Queen Blanche herself, one must still
admit that she was very severe on lovers who showed willingness to
leave her service, and take service with any other lady. One of her
admirers, educated for the priesthood but not yet in full orders, was
obliged by reasons of family interest to quit his career in order to
marry. An insult like this was more than Mary could endure, and she
gave the young man a lesson he never forgot : —

Ireement li prent a dire
La mere au roi de paradis:
" Di moi, di moi, tu que jadis
M'amoies tant de tout ton coeur.
Pourquoi m'as tu jete puer?
Di moi, di moi, ou est done cele
Qui plus de moi bone est et bele? . .
Pourquoi, pourquoi, las durfeus,
Las engignez, las deceuz,
Me lais pour une lasse fame,
Qui suis du ciel Royne et Dame?
Enne fais tu trop mauvais change
Qui tu por une fame estrange
Me laisses qui par amors t'amoie
Et ja ou ciel t'apareilloie
En mes chambres un riche lit
Por couchier t'ame a grand delit?
Trop par as faites grant merveilles
S'autrement tost ne te conseilles
Ou ciel serra tes lits deffais
Et en la flamme d'enfer faiz!"

With anger flashing in her eyes
Answers the Queen of Paradise:
"Tell me, tell me! you of old
Loved me once with love untold;
Why now throw me aside?
Tell me, tell me! where a bride
Kinder or fairer have you won? . . .
Wherefore, wherefore, wretched one,
Deceived, betrayed, misled, undone,
Leave me for a creature mean.
Me, who am of Heaven the Queen?
Can you make a worse exchange.
You that for a woman strange,
Leave me who, with perfect love.
Waiting you in heaven above,
Had in my chamber richly dressed
A bed of bliss your soul to rest?
Terrible is your mistake!
Unless you better council take,
In heaven your bed shall be unmade.
And in the flames of hell be spread."

A mistress who loved in this manner was not to be gainsaid. No
earthly love had a chance of holding its own against this unfair com-
bination of heaven and hell, and Mary was as unscrupulous as any other

272 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

great lady in abusing all her advantages in order to save her souls.
Frenchmen never found fault with abuses of power for what they
thought a serious object. The more tyrannical Mary was, the more her
adorers adored, and they wholly approved, both in love and in law, the
rule that any man who changed his allegiance without permission, did
so at his own peril. His life and property were forfeit. Mary showed
him too much grace in giving him an option.

Even in anger Mary always remained a great lady, and in the
ordinary relations of society her manners were exquisite, as they were,
according to Joinville, in the court of Saint Louis, when tempers were
not overwrought. The very brutality of the brutal compelled the
courteous to exaggerate courtesy, and some of the royal family were as
coarse as the king was delicate in manners. In heaven the manners
were perfect, and almost as stately as those of Roland and Oliver. On
one occasion Saint Peter found himself embarrassed by an affair which
the public opinion of the Court of Heaven, although not by any means
puritanic, thought more objectionable — in fact, more frankly dis-
creditable — than an honest corrupt job ought to be; and even his in-
fluence, though certainly considerable, wholly failed to carry it through
the law-court. The case, as reported by Gaultier de Coincy, was this:
A very worthless creature of Saint Peter's, — a monk of Cologne, —
who had led a scandalous life, and "ne cremoit dieu, ordre ne roule,"
died, and in due course of law was tried, convicted, and dragged off by
the devils to undergo his term of punishment. Saint Peter could not
desert his sinner, though much ashamed of him, and accordingly made
formal application to the Trinity for a pardon. The Trinity, somewhat
severely, refused. Finding his own interest insufficient. Saint Peter
tried to strengthen it by asking the archangels to help him; but the
case was too much for them also, and they declined. The brother
apostles were appealed to, with the same result; and finally even the
saints, though they had so obvious interest in keeping friendly relations
with Peter, found public opinion too strong to defy. The case was

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

273

desperate. The Trinity were — or was — emphatic, and — what was
rare in the Middle Ages — every member of the feudal hierarchy sus-
tained its decision. Nothing more could be done in the regular way.
Saint Peter was obliged to divest himself of authority, and place him-
self and his dignity in the hands of the Virgin. Accordingly he asked
for an audience, and stated the case to Our Lady. With the utmost
grace, she instantly responded : —

" Pierre, Pierre," dit Nostre Dame,

En moult grand poine at por ceste ame
De mon douz filz me fierai
Tant que pour toi Ten prierai."
La Mere Dieu lors s'est levee,
Devant son filz s'en est alee
Et ses virges toutes apres.
De lui si tint Pierre pres,
Quar sanz doutance bien savoit
Que sa besoigne faite avoit
Puisque cele I'avoit en prise
Ou forme humaine avoit prise.

Quant sa Mere vit li douz Sire
Qui de son doit daigna escrire
Qu'en honourant et pere et mere
En contre lui a chere clere
Se leva moult festivement
Et si li dist moult doucement;
"Bien veigniez vous, ma douce mere,"
Comme douz filz, comme douz pere.
Doucement I'a par la main prise
Et doucement lez lui assise;
Lors li a dit: — "A douce chiere,
Que veus ma douce mere chiere,
Mes amies et mes sereurs? "

" Pierre, Pierre," our Lady said,
" With all my heart I '11 give you aid,
And to my gentle Son I '11 sue
Until I beg that soul for you."
God's Mother then arose straightway,
And sought her Son without delay;
All her virgins followed her,
And Saint Peter kept him near.
For he knew his task was done
And his prize already won.
Since it was hers, in whom began
The life of God in form of Man.

When our dear Lord, who deigned to write
With his own hand that in his sight
Those in his kingdom held most dear
Father and mother honoured here, —
When He saw His Mother's face
He rose and said with gentle grace:
"Well are you come, my heart's desire!"
Like loving son, like gracious sire;
Took her hand gently in His own;
Gently placed her on His throne.
Wishing her graciously good cheer: —
"What brings my gentle Mother here.
My sister, and my dearest friend?"

One can see Queen Blanche going to beg — or command — a fa-
vour of her son, King Louis, and the stately dignity of their address,
while Saint Peter and the virgins remain in the antechamber; but, as
for Saint Peter's lost soul, the request was a mere form, and the doors
of paradise were instantly opened to it, after such brief formalities as
should tend to preserve the technical record of the law-court.

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MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

We tread here on very delicate ground. Gaultier de Coincy, being
a priest and a prior, could take liberties which we cannot or ought not
to take. The doctrines of the Church are too serious and too ancient
to be wilfully misstated, and the doctrines of what is called Mariolatry
were never even doctrines of the Church. Yet it is true that, in the
hearts of Mary's servants, the Church and its doctrines were at the
mercy of Mary's will. Gaultier de Coincy claimed that Mary exas-
perated the devils by exercising a wholly arbitrary and illegitimate
power. Gaultier not merely admitted, but frankly asserted, that this
was the fact: —

Font li deables: — "de cest plait,
Mai por mal, assez miex nous plest
Que nous aillons au jugement
Li haut jugeur qui ne ment.
C'au plait n'au jugement sa mere
De droit jugier est trop avere;
Mais dieu nous juge si adroit,
Plainement nous lest notre droit.
Sa mere juge en tel maniere
Qu'elle nous met touz jors arriere
Quant nous cuidons estre devant.

En del et en terre est plus Dame
Par un petit que Diex ne soit.
U I'aimme tant et tant la croit,
N'est riens qu'elle face ne die
Qu'il desveile ne contredie.
Quant qu'elle veut li fait acroire,
S'elle disoit la pie est noire
Et I'eue trouble est toute clere:
Si diroit il voir dit ma merel"

" In this law-suit," say the devils,

"Since it is a choice of evils.

We had best appeal on high

To the Judge Who does not lie.

What is law to any other,

'T is no use pleading with His Mother;

But God judges us so true

That He leaves us all our due.

His Mother judges us so short

That she throws us out of court

When we ought to win our cause.

In heaven and earth she makes more laws
By far, than God Himself can do,
He loves her so, and trusts her so,
There's nothing she can do or say
That He '11 refuse, or say her nay.
Whatever she may want is right,
Though she say that black is white.
And dirty water clear as snow: —
My Mother says it, and it's sol"

If the Virgin took the feelings of the Trinity into consideration, or
recognized its existence except as her Son, the case has not been
reported, or, at all events, has been somewhat carefully kept out of
sight by the Virgin's poets. The devils were emphatic in denouncing
Mary for absorbing the whole Trinity. In one sharply disputed case in
regard to a villain, or labourer, whose soul the Virgin claimed because

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

275

he had learned the "Ave Maria," the devils became very angry, indeed,
and protested vehemently : —

Li lait maufe, li rechinie

Adonc ont ris et eschinie.

C'en font il: — "Merveillans merveillel

Por ce vilain plate oreille

Aprent vo Dame a saluer,

Se nous vorro trestous tuer

Se regarder osons vers s'ame.

De tout le monde vieut estre Darnel

Ains nule dame ne fu tiez.

II est avis qu'ele soit Dies

Ou qu'ele ait Diex en main bornie.

Nul besoigne n'est fournie,
Ne terrienne ne celestre,

Que toute Dame ne veille estre.
II est avis que tout soit suen;
Dieu ne deable n'i ont rien."

The ugly demons laugh outright

And grind their teeth with envious spite;

Crying: — "Marvel marvellous!

Because that flat-eared ploughman there

Learned to make your Dame a prayer,

She would like to kill us all

Just for looking toward his soul.

All the world she wants to rule!

No such Dame was ever seen!

She thinks that she is God, I ween,

Or holds Him in her hollow hand.

Not a judgment or command

Or an order can be given

Here on earth or there in heaven.

That she does not want control.

She thinks that she ordains the whole,

And keeps it all for her own profit.

God nor Devil share not of it."

As regards Mary of Chartres, these charges seem to have been
literally true, except so far as concerned the "laid maufe" Pierre de
Dreux, Gaultier de Coincy saw no impropriety in accepting, as suf-
ficiently exact, the allegations of the devils against the Virgin's abuse
of power. Down to the death of Queen Blanche, which is all that
concerns us, the public saw no more impropriety in it than Gaultier
did. The ugly, envious devils, notorious as students of the Latin Quar-
ter, were perpetually making the same charges against Queen Blanche
and her son, without disturbing her authority. No one could conceive
that the Virgin held less influence in heaven than the queen mother on
earth. Nevertheless there were points in the royal policy and conduct
of Mary which thoughtful men even then hesitated to approve. The
Church itself never liked to be dragged too far under feminine influ-
ence, although the moment it discarded feminine influence it lost nearly
everything of any value to it or to the world, except its philosophy.
Mary's tastes were too popular; some of the uglier devils said they
were too low ; many ladies and gentle men of the " si^cle " thought them

276

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

disreputable, though they dared not say so, or dared say so only by
proxy, as in "Aucassins." As usual, one must go to the devils for
the exact truth, and in spite of their outcry, the devils admitted that
they had no reason to complain of Mary's administration: —

"Les beles dames de grant pris
Qui traynant vont ver et gris,
Roys, roynes, dus et contesses,
En enfer vienent a granz presses;
Mais ou ciel vont pres tout a fait
Tort et bogu et contrefait.
Ou ciel va toute la ringaille;
Le grain avons et dies la paille."

"All the great dames and ladies fair
UTio costly robes and ermine wear,
Kings, queens, and countesses and lords
Come down to hell in endless hordes;
While up to heaven go the lamed,
The dwarfs, the humpbacks, and the maimed;
To heaven goes the whole riS-rafI;
We get the grain and God the chaff."

True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the Virgin
embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason, behind all
the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored her with a
passion such as no other deity has ever inspired: and why we, although
utter strangers to her, are not far from getting down on our knees and
praying to her still. Mary concentrated in herself the whole rebellion
of man against fate; the whole protest against divine law; the whole
contempt for human law as its outcome; the whole unutterable fury
of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prison-house,
and suddenly seized by a hope that in the Virgin man had found a }
door of escape. She was above law; she took feminine pleasure in turn-
ing hell into an ornament; she delighted in trampling on every social
distinction in this world and the next. She knew that the universe was
as unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her wor-
shippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it was any
more intelligible to the Creator of it. To her, every suppliant was a
universe in itself, to be judged apart, on his own merits, by his love for
her, — by no means on his orthodoxy, or his conventional standing in
the Church, or according to his correctness in defining the nature of the
Trinity. The convulsive hold which Mary to this day maintains over
human imagination — as you can see at Lourdes — was due much less

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME 277

to her power of saving soul or body than to her sympathy with people
who suffered under law, — divine or human, — justly or unjustly, by
accident or design, by decree of God or by guile of Devil. She cared not
a straw for conventional morality, and she had no notion of letting
her friends be punished, to the tenth or any other generation, for the
sins of their ancestors or the peccadilloes of Eve.

So Mary filled heaven with a sort of persons little to the taste of
any respectable middle-class society, which has trouble enough in
making this world decent and pay its bills, without having to continue
the effort in another. Mary stood in a Church of her own, so independ-
ent that the Trinity might have perished without much affecting
her position ; but, on the other hand, the Trinity could look on and see
her dethroned with almost a breath of relief. Aucassins and the devils
of Gaultier de Coincy foresaw her danger. Mary's treatment of re-
spectable and law-abiding people who had no favours to ask, and were
reasonably confident of getting to heaven by the regular judgment,
without expense, rankled so deeply that three hundred years later the
Puritan reformers were not satisfied with abolishing her, but sought to
abolish the woman altogether as the cause of all evil in heaven and
on earth. The Puritans abandoned the New Testament and the Virgin
in order to go back to the beginning, and renew the quarrel with Eve.
This is the Church's affair, not ours, and the women are competent
to settle it with Church or State, without help from outside ; but hon-
est tourists are seriously interested in putting the feeling back into the
dead architecture where it belongs,

Mary was rarely harsh to any suppliant or servant, and she took
no special interest in humiliating the rich or the learned or the
wise. For them, law was made; by them, law was administered; and
with their doings Mary never arbitrarily interfered; but occasionally
she could not resist the temptation to intimate her opinion of the man-
ner in which the Trinity allowed their — the regular — Church to bfe
administered. She was a queen, and never for an instant forgot it, but

278 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

she took little thought about her divine rights, if she had any, — and in
fact Saint Bernard preferred her without them, — while she was scan-
dalized at the greed of officials in her Son's Court. One day a rich
usurer and a very poor old woman happened to be dying in the same
town. Gaultier de Coincy did not say, as an accurate historian should,
that he was present, nor did he mention names or dates, although it
was one of his longest and best stories. Mary never loved bankers,
and had no reason for taking interest in this one, or for doing him
injury; but it happened that the parish priest was summoned to both
death-beds at the same time, and neglected the old pauper in the hope
of securing a bequest for his church from the banker. This was the
sort of fault that most annoyed Mary in the Church of the Trinity,
which, in her opinion, was not cared for as it should be, and she felt
it her duty to intimate as much.

Although the priest refused to come at the old woman's summons,
his young clerk, who seems to have acted as vicar though not in
orders, took pity on her, and went alone with the sacrament to her
hut, which was the poorest of poor hovels even for that age: —

Close de piex et de serciaus Roof of hoops, and wall of logs,

Comme une viez sotiz a porciaus. Like a wretched stye for hogs.

There the beggar lay, already insensible or at the last gasp, on coarse
thatch, on the ground, covered by an old hempen sack. The picture
represented the extremest poverty of the thirteenth century; a hovel
without even a feather bed or bedstead, as Aucassins' ploughman
described his mother's want ; and the old woman alone, dying, as the
clerk appeared at the opening : —

Li clers qui fu moult bien apris The clerk, well in these duties taught,

Le cors Nostre Seigneur a pris The body of our Saviour brought

A I'ostel a la povre fame Where she lay upon her bed

S'en vient touz seus mes n'i treuve ame. Without a soul to give her aid.

Si grant clarte y a veue But such brightness there he saw

Que grant peeur en a eue. As filled his mind with fear and awe.

Ou povre lit a la vieillete Covered with a mat of straw

Qui couvers iert d'une nateite The woman lay; but rotmd and near

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

279

Assises voit XII puceles
Si avenans et si tres beles
N'est nus tant penser i seust
Qui raconter le vout peust.
A coutee volst Nostre Dame
Sus le chevez la povre fame
Qui por la mort sue et travaille.
La Mere Dieu d'une tovaille
Qui bbnche est plus que fleur de lis
La grant sueur d'entor le vis
A ses blanches mains 11 essuie.

A dozen maidens sat, so fair

No mortal man could dream such light,

No mortal tongue describe the sight.

Then he saw that next the bed,

By the poor old woman's head,

As she gasped and strained for breath

In the agony of death,

Sat Our Lady, — bending low, —

While, with napkin white as snow,

She dried the death-sweat on the brow.

The clerk, in terror, hesitated whether to turn and run away, but
Our Lady beckoned him to the bed, while all rose and kneeled devoutly
to the sacrament. Then she said to the trembling clerk: —

"Friend, be not afraidi
But seat yourself, to give us aid.
Beside these maidens, on the bed."

And when the clerk had obeyed, she continued —

"Or tost, amis!" fait Nostre Dame,

" Confessies ceste bone fame

Et puis apres tout sans freeur

Recevra tost son sauveeur

Qui char et sane vout en moi prendre."

"Come quickly, friend I " Our Lady says,

"This good old woman now confess

And afterwards without distress

She will at once receive her God

Who deigned in me take flesh and blood."

After the sacrament came a touch of realism that recalls the simple
death-scenes that Walter Scott described in his grand twelfth-century
manner. The old woman lingered pitiably in her agony: —

Lors dit une des demoiseles
A madame sainte Marie:
" Encore, dame, n'istra mie
Si com moi semble du cors I'ame."
"Bele fille," fait Nostre Dame, 1
"Traveiller lais un peu le cors,
Ainfois que I'ame en isse hors,
Si que puree soit et nete
Ainfois qu'en Paradis la mete.
N'est or mestier qui soions plus,
Ralon nous en ou ciel lassus.
Quant tens en iert bien reviendrons
En paradis I'ame emmerrons."

A maiden said to Saint Marie,

"My lady, still it seems to me
The soul will not the body fly."
"Fair child!" Our Lady made reply,
"Still let awhile the body fight
Before the soul shall leave it quite.
So that it pure may be, and cleansed
When it to Paradise ascends.
No longer need we here remain;
We can go back to heaven again;
We will return before she dies.
And take the soul to paradise."

280 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

The rest of the story concerned the usurer, whose death-bed was
of a different character, but Mary's interest in death-beds of that kind
was small. The fate of the usurer mattered the less because she knew
too well how easily the banker, in good credit, could arrange with the
officials of the Trinity to open the doors of paradise for him. The
administration of heaven was very like the administration of France;
the Queen Mother saw many things of which she could not wholly
approve; but her nature was pity, not justice, and she shut her eyes
to much that she could not change. Her miracles, therefore, were for
the most part mere evidence of her pity for those who needed it most,
and these were rarely the well-to-do people of the siecle, but more
commonly the helpless. Every saint performed miracles, and these are
standard, not peculiar to any one intermediator; and every saint pro-
tected his own friends; but beyond these exhibitions of power, which
are more or less common to the whole hierarchy below the Trinity, Mary
was the mother of pity and the only hope of despair. One might go on
for a volume, studying the character of Mary and the changes that
time made in it, from the earliest Byzantine legends down to the daily
recorded miracles at Lourdes; no character in history has had so long or
varied a development, and none so sympathetic; but the greatest poets
long ago plundered that mine of rich motives, and have stolen what
was most dramatic for popular use. The Virgin's most famous early
miracle seems to have been that of the monk Theophilus, which was
what one might call her salvation of Faust. Another Byzantine miracle
was an original version of Shylock. Shakespeare and his fellow-drama-
tists plundered the Church legends as freely as their masters plundered
the Church treasuries, yet left a mass of dramatic material untouched.
Let us pray the Virgin that it may remain untouched, for, although a
good miracle was in its day worth much money, — so much that the
rival shrines stole each other's miracles without decency, — one does
not care to see one's Virgin put to money-making for Jew theatre-manag-
ers. One's two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors shrink.

LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME

281

For mere amusement, too, the miracle is worth reading of the little
Jew child who ignorantly joined in the Christian communion, and was
thrown into a furnace by his father in consequence ; but when the fur-
nace was opened, the Virgin appeared seated in the midst of the flames,
with the little child unharmed in her lap. A better is that called the
"Tombeor de Notre Dame," only recently printed; told by some un-
known poet of the thirteenth century, and told as well as any of
Gaultier de Coincy's. Indeed the "Tombeor de Notre Dame" has
had more success in our time than it ever had in its own, as far as one
knows, for it appeals to a quiet sense of humour that pleases modern
French taste as much as it pleased the Virgin. One fears only to spoil
it by translation, but if a translation be merely used as a glossary or
footnote, it need not do fatal harm.

The story is that of a tumbler — tombeor, street-acrobat — who was
disgusted with the world, as his class has had a reputation for becoming,
and who was fortunate enough to obtain admission into the famous
monastery of Clairvaux, where Saint Bernard may have formerly been
blessed by the Virgin's presence. Ignorant at best, and especially igno-
rant of letters, music, and the offices of a religious society, he found
himself unable to join in the services: —

Car n'ot vescu fors de turner
Et d'espringier at de baler.
Treper, saillir, ice savoit;
Ne d'autre rien il ne savoit;
Car ne savoit autre lecon
Ne "pater noster" ne chanson
Ne le "credo" ne le salu
Ne rien qui fust a son salu.

For he had learned no other thing
Than to tumble, dance and spring:
Leaping and vaulting, that he knew,
But nothing better could he do.
He could not say his prayers by rote;
Not "Pater noster"; not a note;
Not "Ave Mary," nor the creed;
Nothing to help his soul in need.

Tormented by the sense of his uselessness to the society whose
bread he ate without giving a return in service, and afraid of being
expelled as a useless member, one day while the bells were calling to
mass he hid in the crypt, and in despair began to soliloquize before
the Virgin's altar, at the same spot, one hopes, where the Virgin had

282

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shown herself, or might have shown herself, in her infinite bounty, to
Saint Bernard, a hundred years before: —

"Hai," fait il, "con suis trais!
Or dira ja cascuns sa laisse
Et jo suis ci i bues en laisse
Qui ne fas ci fors que broster
Et viandes por nient gaster.
Si ne dirai ne ne ferai?
Par la mere deu, si ferai!
Ja n'en serai ore repris;
Jo ferai ce que j'ai apris;
Si servirai de men mestier
La mere deu en son mostier;
Li autre servent de canter
Et jo servirai de turner."
Sa cape oste, si se despoille,
Deles I'autel met sa despoille,
Mais por sa char que ne soit nue
Une cotele a retenue
Qui moult estait tenre et alise,
Petit vaut miex d'une chemise,
Si est en pur le cors remes.
II s'est bien chains et acesmes,
Sa cote faint et bien s'atome,
Devers I'ymage se retorne
Mout humblement et si I'esgarde:
"Dame," fait il, "en vostre garde
Comant jo et mon cors et m'ame.
Douce reine, douce dame,
Ne despisies ce que jo sai
Car jo me voil metre a I'asai
De vos servir en bone foi
Se dex m'ait sans nul desroi.
Jo ne sai canter ne lire
Mais certes jo vos voil eslire
Tos mes biax gieus a eslicon.
Or sole al fuer de taurecon
Qui trepe et saut devant sa mere.
Dame, qui n'estes mie amere
A eels qui vos servent a droit,
Quelsque jo soie, por vos soit ! "

Lors li commence a faire saus
Bas et petits et grans et haus

"Hal" said he, "how I am ashamed!

To sing his part goes now each priest.

And I stand here, a tethered beast,

Who nothing do but browse and feed

And waste the food that others need.

Shall I say nothing, and stand still?

No! by God's mother, but I will!

She shall not think me here for naught ;

At least I'll do what I've been taught!

At least I '11 serve in my own way

God's mother in her church to-day.

The others serve to pray and sing;

I will serve to leap and spring."

Then he strips him of his gown,

Lays it on the altar down;

But for himself he takes good care

Not to show his body bare.

But keeps a jacket, soft and thin.

Almost a shirt, to tumble in.

Clothed in this supple woof of maiUe

His strength and health and form showed well,

And when his belt is buckled fast.

Toward the Virgin turns at last :

Very humbly makes his prayer;

"Lady!" says he, "to your care

I commit my soul and frame.

Gentle Virgin, gentle dame.

Do not despise what I shall do,

For I ask only to please you.

To serve you like an honest man.

So help me God, the best I can.

I cannot chant, nor can I read.

But I can show you here instead,

All my best tricks to make you laugh.

And so shall be as though a calf

Should leap and jump before its dam.

Lady, who never yet could blame

Those who serve you well and true,

All that I am, I am for you."

Then he begins to jump about.
High and low, and in and out.

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283

Primes deseur et puis desos,
Puis se remet sor ses genols,
Devers I'yniage, et si I'encline:
"He!" fait il, "tres douce reine
Par vo pitie, par vo francise,
Ne despisies pas mon servisel"

Straining hard with might and main;
Then, falling on his knees again,
Before the image bows his face:
"By your pityl by your grace!"
Says he, "Ha! my gentle queen,
Do not despise my offering!"

In his earnestness he exerted himself until, at the end of his strength,
he lay exhausted and unconscious on the altar steps. Pleased with his
own exhibition, and satisfied that the Virgin was equally pleased, he
continued these devotions every day, until at last his constant and
singular absence from the regular services attracted the curiosity of
a monk, who kept watch on him and reported his eccentric exercise
to the Abbot.

The mediaeval monasteries seem to have been gently administered.
Indeed, this has been made the chief reproach on them, and the excuse
for robbing them for the benefit of a more energetic crown and nobility
who tolerated no beggars or idleness but their own; at least, it is safe
to say that few well-regulated and economically administered modern
charities would have the patience of the Abbot of Clairvaux, who, in-
stead of calling up the weak-minded tombeor and sending him back to
the world to earn a living by his profession, went with his informant
to the crypt, to see for himself what the strange report meant. We
have seen at Chartres what a crypt may be, and how easily one might
hide in its shadows while mass is said at the altars. The Abbot and
his informant hid themselves behind a column in the shadow, and
watched the whole performance to its end when the exhausted tumbler
dropped unconscious and drenched with perspiration on the steps of
the altar, with the words: —

"Dame!" fait il, "ne puis plus ore;
Mais voire je reviendrai encore."

"Lady!" says he, "no more I can,
But truly I'll come back again 1"

You can imagine the dim crypt; the tumbler lying unconscious
beneath the image of the Virgin; the Abbot peering out from the
shadow of the column, and wondering what sort of discipline he could

284

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

inflict for this unforeseen infraction of rule; when suddenly, before he
could decide what next to do, the vault above the altar, of its own
accord, opened: —

L'abes esgarde sans atendre
Et vit de la volte descendre
Une dame si gloriouse
Ains nus ne vit si preciouse
Ni si ricement conreee,
N'onques tant bele ne fu nee.
Ses vesteures sont bien chieres
D'or et de precieuses pieres.
Avec li estoient li angle
Del ciel amont, et li arcangle,
Qui entor le menestrel vienent,
Si le solacent et sostienent.
Quant entor lui sont arengie
S'ot tot son cuer asoagie.
Dont s'aprestent de lui servir
Per ce qu'ils volrent deservir
La servise que fait la dame
Qui tant est precieuse geme.
Et la douce reine france
Tenoit une touaille blance,
S'en avente son menestrel
Mout doucement devant I'autel.
La franc dame debonnaire
Le col, le cors, et le viaire
Li avente por refroidier;
Bien s'entremet de lui aidier;
La dame bien s'i abandone;
Li bons hom garde ne s'en done,
Car il ne voit, si ne set mie
Qu'il ait si bele compaignie.

The Abbot strains his eyes to see,
And, from the vaulting, suddenly,
A lady steps, — so glorious, —
Beyond all thought so precious, —
Her robes so rich, so nobly worn, —
So rare the gems the robes adorn, —
As never yet so fair was born.

Along with her the angels were,
Archangels stood beside her there;
Round about the tumbler group
To give him solace, bring him hope;
And when round him in ranks they stood.
His whole heart felt its strength renewed.
So they haste to give him aid
Because their wills are only made
To serve the service of their Queen,
Most precious gem the earth has seen.
And the lady, gentle, true,
Holds in her hand a towel new;
Fans him with her hand divine
Where he lies before the shrine.
The kind lady, full of grace.
Fans his neck, his breast, his face!
Fans him herself to give him air!
Labours, herself, to help him there!
The lady gives herself to it;
The poor man takes no heed of it;
For he knows not and cannot see
That he has such fair company.

Beyond this we need not care to go. If you cannot feel the colour
and quality — the union of naivet6 and art, the refinement, the in-
finite delicacy and tenderness — of this little poem, then nothing will
matter much to you; and if you can feel it, you can feel, without more
assistance, the majesty of Chartres.

CHAPTER XIV

ABELARD

Super cuncta, subter cuncta,
Extra cuncta, intra cuncta,
Intra cuncta nee inclusus,
Extra cuncta nee exclusus.
Super cuncta nee elatus,
Subter cuncta nee substratus,
Super totus, praesidendo,
Subter totus, sustinendo.
Extra totus, complectendo,
Intra totus est, implendo.

ACCORDING to Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans and Archbishop
of Tours, these verses describe God. Hildebert was the first
poet of his time; no small merit, since he was contemporary with the
" Chanson de Roland " and the first crusade; he was also a strong man,
since he was able, as Bishop of Le Mans, to gain great credit by main-
taining himself against William the Norman and Fulk of Anjou; and
finally he was a prelate of high authority. He lived between 1055 and
1 133. Supposing his verses to have been written in middle life, toward
the year iioo, they may be taken to represent the accepted doctrine
of the Church at the time of the first crusade. They were little more
than a versified form of the Latin of Saint Gregory the Great who
wrote five hundred years before: "Ipse manet intra omnia, ipse extra
omnia, ipse supra omnia, ipse infra omnia; et superior est per poten-
tiam et inferior per sustentationem ; exterior per magnitudinem et
interior per subtilitatem; sursum regens, deorsum continens, extra
circumdans, interius penetrans; nee alia parte superior, alia inferior,
aut alia ex parte exterior atque ex alia manet interior, sed unus idem-
que totus ubique." According to Saint Gregory, in the sixth century,
God was "one and the same and wholly everywhere"; "immanent

286 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

within everything, without everything, above everything, below
everything, sursum regens, deorsum continens" ; while according
to Archbishop Hildebert in the eleventh century: "God is over all
things, under all things; outside all, inside all; within but not enclosed;
without but not excluded ; above but not raised up ; below but not de-
pressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly beneath, sustaining; wholly
without, embracing ; wholly within, filling. " Finally, according to Bene-
dict Spinoza, another five hundred years later still : " God is a being, ab-
solutely infinite; that is to say, a substance made up of an infinity of
attributes, each one of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence."

Spinoza was the great pantheist, whose name is still a terror to the
orthodox, and whose philosophy is — very properly — a horror to the
Church; and yet Spinoza never wrote a line that, to the unguided
student, sounds more Spinozist than the words of Saint Gregory and
Archbishop Hildebert. If God is everywhere; wholly; presiding, sus-
taining, embracing and filling, "sursum regens, deorsum continens,"
He is the only possible energy, and leaves no place for human will to
act. A force which is "one and the same and wholly everywhere" is
more Spinozist than Spinoza, and is likely to be mistaken for frank
pantheism by the large majority of religious minds who must try
to understand it without a theological course in a Jesuit college. In
the year i loo Jesuit colleges did not exist, and even the great Domini-
can and Franciscan schools were far from sight in the future; but the
School of Notre Dame at Paris existed, and taught the existence of God
much as Archbishop Hildebert described it. The most successful lec-
turer was William of Champeaux, and to any one who ever heard of
William at all, the name instantly calls up the figure of Ab^lard, in
flesh and blood, as he sang to H^loise the songs which he says re*
sounded through Europe. The twelfth century, with all its sparkle,
would be dull without Abelard and HeloTse.

With infinite regret, H^loise must be left out of the story, because
she was not a philosopher or a poet or an artist, but only a French-

ABfiLARD 287

woman to the last millimetre of her shadow. Even though one may
suspect that her famous letters to Ab61ard are, for the most part, by
no means above scepticism, she was, by French standards, worth at
least a dozen Ab61ards, if only because she called Saint Bernard a false
apostle. Unfortunately, French standards, by which she must be
judged in our ignorance, take for granted that she philosophized only
for the sake of Abelard, while Abelard taught philosophy to her not so
much because he believed in philosophy or in her as because he believed
in himself. To this day, Abelard remains a problem as perplexing as
he must have been to Heloise, and almost as fascinating. As the west
portal of Chartres is the door through which one must of necessity
enter the Gothic architecture of the thirteenth century, so Abelard is
the portal of approach to the Gothic thought and philosophy within.
Neither art nor thought has a modern equivalent; only Heloise, like
Isolde, unites the ages.

The first crusade seems, in perspective, to have filled the whole field
of vision in France at the time; but, in fact, France seethed with other
emotions, and while the crusaders set out to scale heaven by force at
Jerusalem, the monks, who remained at home, undertook to scale
heaven by prayer and by absorption of body and soul in God; the Cis-
tercian Order was founded in 1098, and was joined in 11 12 by young
Bernard, born in 1090 at Fontaines-les-Dijon, drawing with him or
after him so many thousands of young men into the self-immolation
of the monastery as carried dismay into the hearts of half the women
of France. At the same time — that is, about 1098 or 1 100 — Abelard
came up to Paris from Brittany, with as much faith in logic as Bernard
had in prayer or Godfrey of Bouillon in arms, and led an equal or even
a greater number of combatants to the conquest of heaven by force of
pure reason. None showed doubt. Hundreds of thousands of young
men wandered from their provinces, mostly to Palestine, largely to
cloisters, but also in great numbers to Paris and the schools, while few
ever returned.

288 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Ab^Iard had the advantage of being well-born; not so highly de-
scended as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas who were to com-
plete his work in the thirteenth century, but, like Bernard, a gentle-
man born and bred. He was the eldest son of Berenger, Sieur du
Pallet, a chateau in Brittany, south of the Loire, on the edge of Poitou.
His name was Pierre du Pallet, although, for some unknown reason, he
called himself Pierre Abailard, or Abeillard, or Esbaillart, or Beylard;
for the spelling was never fixed. He was born in 1079, and when, in
1096, the young men of his rank were rushing off to the first crusade,
Pierre, a boy of seventeen, threw himself with equal zeal into the study
of science, and, giving up his inheritance or birthright, at last came to
Paris to seize a position in the schools. The year is supposed to have
been iioo.

The Paris of Ab61ard's time was astonishingly old; so old that
hardly a stone of it can be now pointed out. Even the oldest of the
buildings still standing in that quarter — Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre,
Saint-Severin, and the tower of the Lycee Henri IV — are more mod-
ern ; only the old Roman Thermae, now part of the Mus^e de Cluny,
within the walls, and the Abbey Tower of Saint-Germainrdes-Pr^s,
outside, in the fields, were standing in the year 1 100. Politically,
Paris was a small provincial town before the reign of Louis-le-Gros
(i 108-37), who cleared its gates of its nearest enemies; but as a school,
Paris was even then easily first. Students crowded into it by thousands,
till the town is said to have contained more students than citizens.
Modern Paris seems to have begun as a university town before it had
a university. Students flocked to it from great distances, encouraged
and supported by charity, and stimulated by privileges, until they took
entire possession of what is still called the Latin Quarter from the bar-
barous Latin they chattered; and a town more riotous, drunken, and
vicious than it became, in the course of time, hardly existed even in
the Middle Ages. In iioo, when enthusiasm was fresh and faith in
science was strong, the great mass of students came there to study,

ABfiLARD 289

and, having no regular university organization or buildings, they
thronged the cloister of Notre Dame, — not our Notre Dame, which
dates only from 1163, but the old Romanesque cathedral which stood
on the same spot, — and there they listened, and retained what they
could remember, for they were not encouraged to take notes even
if they were rich enough to buy notebooks, while manuscripts were
far beyond their means. One valuable right the students seem to
have had — that of asking questions and even of disputing with the
lecturer provided they followed the correct form of dialectics. The
lecturer himself was licensed by the Bishop.

Five thousand students are supposed to have swarmed about the
cloister of Notre Dame, across the Petit Pont, and up the hill of Sainte-
Genevieve; three thousand are said to have paid fees to Abelard in the
days of his great vogue and they seem to have attached themselves to
their favourite master as a champion to be upheld against the world.
Jealousies ran high, and neither scholars nor masters shunned dispute.
Indeed, the only science they taught or knew was the art of dispute
— dialectics. Rhetoric, grammar, and dialectics were the regular
branches of science, and bold students, who were not afraid of dabbling
in forbidden fields, extended their studies to mathematics — "exer-
citium nefarium," according to Ab61ard, which he professed to know
nothing about but which he studied nevertheless. Ab61ard, whether
pupil or master, never held his tongue if he could help it, for his for-
tune depended on using it well ; but he never used it so well in dialectics
or theology as he did, toward the end of his life, in writing a bit of
autobiography, so admirably told, so vivid, so vibrating with the curi-
ous intensity of his generation, that it needed only to have been written
in " Romieu" to be the chief monument of early French prose, as the
western portal of Chartres is the chief monument of early French
sculpture, and of about the same date. Unfortunately Ab61ard was
a noble scholar, who necessarily wrote and talked Latin, even with
Heloise, and, although the Latin was mediaeval, it is not much the

290 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

better on that account, because, in spite of its quaintness, the naivetes
of a young language — the egotism, jealousies, suspicions, boastings,
and lamentations of a childlike time — take a false air of outworn
Rome and Byzantium, although, underneath, the spirit lives: —

I arrived at last in Paris where for a long time dialectics had specially flourished
under William of Champeaux, rightly reckoned the first of my masters in that
branch of study. I stayed some time in his school, but, though well received at
first, I soon got to be an annoyance to him because I persisted in refuting certain
ideas of his, and because, not being afraid to enter into argument against him, I
sometimes got the better. This boldness, too, roused the wrath of those fellow-
students who were classed higher, because I was the youngest and the last comer.
This was the beginning of my series of misfortunes which still last; my renown
every day increasing, envy was kindled against me in every direction.

This picture of the boy of twenty, harassing the professor, day
after day, in his own lecture-room before hundreds of older students,
paints Abelard to the life; but one may safely add a few touches that
heighten the effect; as that William of Champeaux himself was barely
thirty, and that Abelard throughout his career, made use of every
social and personal advantage to gain a point, with little scruple either
in manner or in sophistry. One may easily imagine the scene. Teachers
are always much the same. Pupils and students differ only in degrees
of docility. In i loo, both classes began by accepting the foundations of
society, as they have to do still ; only they then accepted laws of the
Church and Aristotle, while now they accept laws of the legislature
and of energy. In iioo, the students took for granted that, with the
help of Aristotle and syllogisms, they could build out the Church
intellectually, as the architects, with the help of the pointed arch, were
soon to enlarge it architecturally. They never doubted the certainty
of their method. To them words had fixed values, like numbers, and
syllogisms were hewn stones that needed only to be set in place, in
order to reach any height or support any weight. Every sentence was
made to take the form of a syllogism. One must have been educated
in a Jesuit or Dominican school in order to frame these syllogisms

ABfiLARD 291

correctly, but merely by way of illustration one may timidly suggest
how the phrases sounded in their simplest form. For example, Plato or
other equally good authority defined substance as that which stands
underneath phenomena; the most universal of universals, the ultimate,
the highest in order of generalization. The ultimate essence or sub-
stance is indivisible; God is substance; God is indivisible. The divine
substance is incapable of alteration or accident; all other substance is
liable to alteration or accident; therefore, the divine substance differs
from all other substance. A substance is a universal ; as for example. Hu-
manity, or the Human, is a universal and indivisible; the Man Socrates,
for instance, is not a universal, but an individual ; therefore, the sub-
stance Humanity, being indivisible, must exist entire and undivided
in Socrates.

The form of logic most fascinating to youthful minds, as well as to
some minds that are only too acute, is the reducHo ad absurdum; the
forcing an opponent into an absurd alternative or admission: and
the syllogism lent itself happily to this use. Socrates abused the weapon
and Abelard was the first French master of the art; but neither State
nor Church likes to be reduced to an absurdity, and, on the whole, both
Socrates and Abelard fared ill in the result. Even now, one had best
be civil toward the idols of the forum. Abdlard would find most of his
old problems sensitive to his touch to-day. Time has settled few or
none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly
than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether unity or
diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule
of the universe, if universe there is; whether anything, except phenom-
ena, exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak
too loud. Why, and forwhat.and to whom, is man a responsible agent?
Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and
clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every
nation may have a different system. One court may hang and another
may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and science only

292 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

repeats what the Church said to Ab^lard, that where we know so little,
we had better hold our tongues.

According to the latest authorities, the doctrine of universals which
convulsed the schools of the twelfth century has never received an
adequate answer. What is a species? what is a genus or a family or
an order? More or less convenient terms of classification, about which
the twelfth century cared very little, while it cared deeply about the
essence of classes! Science has become too complex to affirm the exist-
ence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the
problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth
century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was
shut between these barriers of substance, universals, and particulars.
Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method. The schools
knew that their society hung for life on the demonstration that God,
the ultimate universal, was a reality, out of which all other universal
truths or realities sprang. Truth was a real thing, outside of human i
experience. The schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else.
John of Salisbury, who attended Abelard's lectures about 1 136, and
became Bishop of Chartres in 1 176, seems to have been more surprised
than we need be at the intensity of the emotion. "One never gets
away from this question," he said. "From whatever point a discussion
starts, it is always led back and attached to that. It is the madness of
Rufus about Naevia; 'He thinks of nothing else; talks of nothing else,
and if Naevia did not exist, Rufus would be dumb.'"

Abelard began it. After his first visit to Paris in 1 100, he seems to
have passed several years elsewhere, while Guillaume de Champeaux
in 1 108, retired from the school in the cloister of Notre Dame, and,
taking orders, established a class in a chapel near by, afterwards
famous as the Abbaye-de-Saint- Victor. The Jardin des Plantes and
the Care d'Orleans now cover the ground where the Abbey stood, on
the banks of the Seine outside the Latin Quarter, and not a trace is
left of its site; but there William continued his course in dialectics,

ABELARD 293

until suddenly Ab^lard reappeared among his scholars, and resumed
his old attacks. This time Ab^lard could hardly call himself a
student. He was thirty years old, and long since had been himself
a teacher; he had attended William's course on dialectics nearly ten
years before, and was past master in the art; he had nothing to learn
from William in theology, for neither William nor he was yet a theol-
ogist by profession. If Ab^lard went back to school, it was certainly
not to learn; but indeed, he himself made little or no pretence of it,
and told with childlike candour not only why he went, but also how
brilliantly he succeeded in his object: —

I returned to study rhetoric in his school. Among other controversial battles, I
succeeded, by the most irrefutable argument, in making him change, or rather
ruin his doctrine of universals. His doctrine consisted in affirming the perfect
identity of the essence in every individual of the same species, so that according
to him there was no difference in the essence but only in the infinite variety of
accidents. He then came to amend his doctrine so as to affirm, not the identity any
longer, but the absence of distinction — the want of difference — in the essence.
And as this question of universals had always been one of the most important ques-
tions of dialectics, — so important that Porphyry, touching on it in his Preliminar-
ies, did not dare to take theresponsibilityof cutting the knot, but said, "It is a very
grave point," — Champeaux, who wasobliged to modify his idea and then renounce
it, saw his course fall into such discredit that they hardly let him make his dialecti-
cal lectures, as though dialectics consisted entirely in the question of universals.

Why was this point so "very grave"? Not because it was mere
dialectics! The only part of the story that seems grave to-day is the
part that Ab61ard left out; the part which Saint Bernard, thirty years
later put in, on behalf of William. We should be more credulous than
twelfth-century monks, if we believed, on Abelard's word in 1 135, that
in 1 1 10 he had driven out of the schools the most accomplished dialec-
tician of the age by an objection so familiar that no other dialectician
was ever silenced by it, — whatever may have been the case with theo-
logians,— and so obvious that it could not have troubled a scholar
of fifteen. William stated a settled doctrine as old as Plato; Ab^-
lard interposed an objection as old as Aristotle. Probably Plato and

294 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Aristotle had received the question and answer from philosophers ten
thousand years older than themselves. Certainly the whole of philos-
ophy has always been involved in the dispute.

The subject is as amusing as a comedy; so amusing that ten minutes
may be well given to playing the scene between William and Abdlard,
not as it happened, but in a form nearer our ignorance, with liberty
to invent arguments for William, and analogies — which are figures
intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent
toys if they fail — such as he never imagined ; while Abelard can
respond with his true rejoinder, fatal in a different sense. For the chief
analogy, the notes of music would serve, or the colours of the solar
spectrum, or an energy, such as gravity; — but the best is geometrical,
because Euclid was as scholastic as William of Champeaux himself, and
his axioms are even more familiar to the schoolboy of the twentieth,
than to the schoolman of the twelfth century.

In these scholastic tournaments the two champions started from
opposite points: — one, from the ultimate substance, God, — the uni-
versal, the ideal, the type; — the other from the individual, Socrates,
the concrete, the observed fact of experience, the object of sensual per-
ception. The first champion — William in this instance — assumed
that the universal was a real thing; and for that reason he was called
a realist. His opponent — Abelard — held that the universal was only
nominally real ; and on that account he was called a nominalist. Truth,
virtue, humanity, exist as units and realities, said William. Truth,
replied Abelard, is only the sum of all possible facts that are true,
as humanity is the sum of all actual human beings. The ideal bed
is a form, made by God, said Plato. The ideal bed is a name, imag-
ined by ourselves, said Aristotle. "I start from the universe," said
William. "I start from the atom," said Abelard; and, once having
started, they necessarily came into collision at some point between
the two.

William of Champeaux, lecturing on dialectics or logic, comes to thfe

ab£lard 295

question of unlversals, which he says, are substances. Starting from
the highest substance, God, all being descends through created sub-
stances by stages, until it reaches the substance animality, from which
it descends to the substance humanity: and humanity being, Hke other
essences or substances, indivisible, passes wholly into each individual,
becoming Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, much as the divine substance
exists wholly and undivided in each member of the Trinity.

Here Abelard interrupts. The divine substance, he says, operates
by laws of its own, and cannot be used for comparison. In treating of
human substance, one is bound by human limitations. If the whole
of humanity is in Socrates, it is wholly absorbed by Socrates, and can-
not be at the same time in Plato, or elsewhere. Following his favourite
reductio ad absurdum, Abelard turns the idea round, and infers from
it that, since Socrates carries all humanity in him, he carries Plato,
too; and both must be in the same place, though Socrat«^s is at Athens
and Plato in Rome.

The objection is familiar to William, who replies by another com-
monplace : —

"Mr. Abelard, might I, without offence, ask you a simple matter?
Can you give me Euclid's definition of a point?"

"If I remember right it is, 'illud cujus nulla pars est'; that which
has no parts."

"Has it existence?"

"Only in our minds."

"Not, then, in God?"

"All necessary truths exist first in God. If the point is a necessary
truth, it exists first there."

"Then might I ask you for Euclid's definition of the line?"

"The line is that which has only extension; 'Linea vocatur ilia quae
solam longitudinem habet.' "

"Can you conceive an infinite straight line?"

."Only as a line which has no end, like the point extended."

296 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

"Supposing we imagine a straight line, like opposite rays of the sun,
proceeding in opposite directions to infinity — is it real?"

" It has no reality except in the mind that conceives it."

"Supposing we divide that line which has no reality into two parts
at its origin in the sun or star, shall we get two infinities? — or shall we
say, two halves of the infinite?"

"We conceive of each as partaking the quality of infinity."

"Now, let us cut out the diameter of the sun; or rather, — since
this is what our successors in the school will do, — let us take a line
of our earth's longitude which is equally unreal, and measure a degree
of this thing which does not exist, and then divide it into equal parts
which we will use as a measure or metre. This metre, which is still
nothing, as I understand you, is infinitely divisible into points? and the
point itself is infinitely small? Therefore we have the finite partaking
the nature of the infinite?"

"Undoubtedly!"

"One step more, Mr. Abelard, if I do not weary you! Let me take
three of these metres which do not exist, and place them so that the
ends of one shall touch the ends of the others. May I ask what is that
figure?"

"I presume you mean it to be a triangle."

"Precisely! and what sort of a triangle?"

"An equilateral triangle, the sides of which measure one metre
each."

"Now let me take three more of these metres which do not exist,
and construct another triangle which does not exist ; — are these two
triangles or one triangle?"

"They are most certainly one — a single concept of the only pos-
sible equilateral triangle measuring one metre on each face."

"You told us a moment ago that a universal could not exist wholly
and exclusively in two individuals at once. Does not the universal
by definition — the equilateral triangle measuring one metre on each

ABELARD 297

face — does it not exist wholly, in its integrity of essence, in each of
the two triangles we have conceived?"

" It does — as a conception."

"I thank you! Now, although I fear wearying you, perhaps you
will consent to let me add matter to mind. I have here on my desk
an object not uncommon in nature, which I will ask you to describe."

"It appears to be a crystal."

"May I ask its shape?"

"I should call it a regular octahedron."

"That is, two pyramids, set base to base? making eight plane sur-
faces, each a perfect equilateral triangle?"

"Concedo triangula (I grant the triangles)."

"Do you know, perchance, what is this material which seems to
give substantial existence to these eight triangles?"

"I do not."

"Nor I! nor does it matter, unless you conceive it to be the work
of man?"

" I do not claim it as man's work."

"Whose, then?"

"We believe all actual creation of matter, united with form, to be
the work of God."

"Surely not the substance of God himself? Perhaps you mean that
this form — this octahedron — is a divine concept."

"I understand such to be the doctrine of the Church."

"Then it seems that God uses this concept habitually to create this
very common crj-stal. One question more, and only one, if you will
permit me to come to the point. Does the matter — the material —
of which this crystal is made affect in any way the form — the nature,
the soul — of the universal equilateral triangle as you see it bounding
these eight plane surfaces?"

"That I do not know, and do not think essential to decide. As far
as these triangles are individual, they are made so by the will of God,

298 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

and not by the substance you call triangle. The universal — the
abstract right angle, or any other abstract form — is only an idea, a
concept, to which reality, individuality, or what we might call energy
is wanting. The only true energy, except man's free will, is God."

"Very good, Mr. Ab61ard! we can now reach our issue. You affirm
that, just as the line does not exist in space, although the eye sees
little else in space, so the triangle does not exist in this crystal, al-
though the crystal shows eight of them, each perfect. You are aware
that on this line which does not exist, and its combination in this
triangle which does not exist, rests the whole fabric of mathematics
with all its necessary truths. In other words, you know that in this
line, though it does not exist, is bound up the truth of the only branch
of human knowledge which claims absolute certainty for human proc-
esses. You admit that this line and triangle, which are mere figments
of our human imagination, not only exist independent of us in the
crystal, but are, as we suppose, habitually and invariably used by God
Himself to give form to the matter contained within the planes of the
crystal. Yet to this line and triangle you deny reality. To mathemati-
cal truth, you deny compulsive force. You hold that an equilateral
triangle may, to you and all other human individuals, be a right-
angled triangle if you choose to imagine it so. Allow me to say, with-
out assuming any claim to superior knowledge, that to me your logic
results in a different conclusion. If you are compelled, at one point or
another of the chain of being, to deny existence to a substance, surely
it should be to the last and feeblest. I see nothing to hinder you from
denying your own existence, which is, in fact, impossible to demon-
strate. Certainly you are free, in logic, to argue that Socrates and
Plato are mere names — that men and matter are phantoms and
dreams. No one ever has proved or ever can prove the contrary.
Infallibly, a great philosophical school will some day be founded on
that assumption. I venture even to recommend it to your acute and
sceptical mind ; but I cannot conceive how, by any process of reason-

ABELARD 299

ing, sensual or supersensual, you can reach the conclusion that the
single form of truth which instantly and inexorably compels our sub-
mission to its laws — is nothing."

Thus far, all was familiar ground ; certainly at least as familiar as
the Pons Asinorum; and neither of the two champions had need to
feel ruffled in temper by the discussion. The real struggle began only at
this point; for until this point was reached, both positions were about
equally tenable. Abelard had hitherto rested quietly on the defensive,
but William's last thrust obliged him to strike in his turn, and he drew
himself up for what, five hundred years later, was called the "Coup de
Jarnac": —

"I do not deny," he begins; "on the contrary, I affirm that the
universal, whether we call it humanity, or equilateral triangle, has a
sort of reality as a concept; that it is something; even a substance, if
you insist upon it. Undoubtedly the sum of all individual men results
in the concept of humanity. What I deny is that the concept results
in the individual. You have correctly stated the essence of the point
and the line as sources of our concept of the infinite; what I deny is
that they are divisions of the infinite. Universals cannot be divided;
what is capable of division cannot be a universal. I admit the force of
your analogy in the case of the crystal ; but I am obliged to point out to
you that, if you insist on this analogy, you will bring yourself and me
into flagrant contradiction with the fixed foundations of the Church.
If the energy of the triangle gives form to the crystal, and the energy of
the line gives reality to the triangle, and the energy of the infinite gives
substance to the line, all energy at last becomes identical with the
ultimate substance, God Himself. Socrates becomes God in small;
Judas is identical with both; humanity is of the divine essence, and
exists, wholly and undivided, in each of us. The equilateral triangle
we call humanity exists, therefore, entire, identical, in you and me, as
a subdivision of the infinite line, space, energy, or substance, which is
God. I need not remind you that this is pantheism, and that if God is

300 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

the only energy, human free will merges in God's free will ; the Church
ceases to have a reason for existence ; man cannot be held responsible
for his own acts, either to the Church or to the State; and finally,
though very unwillingly, I must, in regard for my own safety, bring
the subject to the attention of the Archbishop, which, as you know
better than I, will lead to your seclusion, or worse."

Whether Abelard used these precise words is nothing to the point.
The words he left on record were equivalent to these. As translated by
M. de Remusat from a manuscript entitled: "Glossulae magistri Petri
Baelardi super Porphyrium," the phrase runs: "A grave heresy is at
the end of this doctrine; for, according to it, the divine substance
which is recognized as admitting of no form, is necessarily identical
with every substance in particular and with all substance in general."
Even had he not stated the heresy so bluntly, his objection necessarily
pushed William in face of it. Realism, when pressed, always led to
pantheism. William of Champeaux and Bishop or Archbishop Hilde-
bert were personal friends, and Hildebert's divine substance left no
more room for human free will than Abelard saw in the geometric
analogy imagined for William. Throughout the history of the Church
for fifteen hundred years, whenever this theological point has been
pressed against churchmen it has reduced them to evasion or to apol-
ogy. Admittedly, the weak point of realism was its fatally pantheistic
term.

Of course, William consulted his friends in the Church, probably
Archbishop Hildebcrt among the rest, before deciding whether to
maintain or to abandon his ground, and the result showed that he was
guided by their advice. Realism was the Roman arch — the only
possible foundation for any Church; because it assumed unity, and any
other scheme was compelled to prove it, for a starting-point. Let us
see, for a moment, what became of the dialogue, when pushed into
theology, in order to reach some of the reasons which reduced William
to tacit abandonment of a doctrine he could never have surrendered

AB£LARD 301

unless under compulsion. That he was angry is sure, for Ab^lard, by
thus thrusting theology into dialectics, had struck him a foul blow; and
William knew Abelard well: —

"Ah!" he would have rejoined; "you are quick, M. du Pallet, to
turn what I offered as an analogy, into an argument of heresy against
my person. You are at liberty to take that course if you choose,
though I give you fair warning that it will lead you far. But now I
must ask you still another question. This concept that you talk about
— this image in the mind of man, of God, of matter; for I know not
where to seek it — whether is it a reality or not?"

" I hold it as, in a manner, real."

"I want a categorical answer: — Yes or No!"

"Distinguo! (I must qualify.)"

" I will have no qualifications. A substance either is, or not. Choose ! "

To this challenge Ab61ard had the choice of answering Yes, or of
answering No, or of refusing to answer at all. He seems to have done
the last; but we suppose him to have accepted the wager of battle, and
to answer : —

"Yes, then!"

"Good ! " William rejoins; " now let us see how your pantheism dif-
fers from mine. My triangle exists as a reality, or what science will call
an energy, outside my mind, in God, and is impressed on my mind
as it is on a mirror, like the triangle on the cr>'stal, its energy giving
form. Your triangle you say is also an energy, but an essence of my
mind itself; you thrust it into the mind as an integral part of the mirror;
identically the same concept, energy, or necessary truth which is in-
herent in God. Whatever subterfuge you may resort to, sooner or
later you have got to agree that your mind is identical with God's
nature as far as that concept is concerned. Your pantheism goes
further than mine. As a doctrine of the Real Presence peculiar to
yourself, I can commend it to the Archbishop together with your
delation of me."

302 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Supposing that Abelard took the opposite course, and answered : —

"No! my concept is a mere sign."

"A sign of what, in God's name!"

"A sound! a word! a symbol! an echo only of my ignorance."

"Nothing, then! So truth and virtue and charity do not exist at
all. You suppose yourself to exist, but you have no means of knowing
God; therefore, to you God does not exist except as an echo of your
ignorance; and, what concerns you most, the Church does not exist
except as your concept of certain individuals, whom you cannot regard
as a unity, and who suppose themselves to believe in a Trinity which
exists only as a sound, or a symbol. I will not repeat your words, M.
du Pallet, outside this cloister, because the consequences to you would
certainly be fatal ; but it is only too clear that you are a materialist,
and as such your fate must be decided by a Church Council, unless
you prefer the stake by judgment of a secular court."

In truth, pure nominalism — if, indeed, any one ever maintained
it — afforded no cover whatever. Nor did Abelard's concept help the
matter, although for want of a better refuge, the Church was often
driven into it. Conceptualism was a device, like the false wooden
roof, to cover and conceal an inherent weakness of construction. Unity
either is, or is not. If soldiers, no matter in what number, can never
make an army, and worshippers, though in millions, do not make a
Church, and all humanity united would not necessarily constitute a
State, equally little can their concepts, individual or united, constitute
the one or the other. Army, Church, and State, each is an organic
whole, complex beyond all possible addition of units, and not a con-
cept at all, but rather an animal that thinks, creates, devours, and
destroys. The attempt to bridge the chasm between multiplicity and
unity is the oldest problem of philosophy, religion, and science, but
the flimsiest bridge of all is the human concept, unless somewhere,
within or beyond it, an energy not individual is hidden; and in that
case the old question instantly reappears: What is that energy?

ABELARD 303

Ab^Iard would have done well to leave William alone, but Abdlard
was an adventurer, and William was a churchman. To win a victory
over a churchman is not very difficult for an adventurer, and is always
a tempting amusement, because the ambition of churchmen to shine in
worldly contests is disciplined and checked by the broader interests of
the Church: but the victory is usually sterile, and rarely harms the
churchman. The Church cares for its own. Probably the bishops
advised William not to insist on his doctrine, although every bishop
may have held the same view. William allowed himself to be silenced
without a judgment, and in that respect stands almost if not quite alone
among schoolmen. The students divined that he had sold himself to
the Church, and consequently deserted him. Very soon he received
his reward in the shape of the highest dignity open to private ambition
— a bishopric. As Bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne he made for himself
a great reputation, which does not concern us, although it deeply
concerned the unfortunate Abelard, for it happened, either by chance
or design, that within a year or two after William established himself
at Chalons, young Bernard of Citeaux chose a neighbouring diocese
in which to establish a branch of the Cistercian Order, and Bishop
William took so keen an interest in the success of Bernard as almost
to claim equal credit for it. Clairvaux was, in a manner, William's
creation, although not in his diocese, and yet, if there was a priest in
all France who fervently despised the schools, it was young Bernard.
William of Champeaux, the chief of schoolmen, could never have
gained Bernard's affections. Bishop William of Chalons must have
drifted far from dialectics into mysticism in order to win the support
of Clairvaux, and train up a new army of allies who were to mark
Abelard for an easy prey.

Meanwhile Abelard pursued his course of triumph in the schools,
and in due time turned from dialectics to theology, as every ambitious
teacher could hardly fail to do. His affair with Hdloise and their mar-
riage seem to have occupied his time in 11 17 or 11 18, for they both

304 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

retired into religious orders in 1 119, and he resumed his lectures in
1 1 20. With his passion for rule, he was fatally certain to attempt
ruling the Church as he ruled the schools; and, as it was always enough
for him that any point should be tender in order that he should press
upon it, he instantly and instinctively seized on the most sensitive
nerve of the Church system to wrench it into his service. He became
a sort of apostle of the Holy Ghost.

That the Trinity is a mystery was a law of theology so absolute as in
a degree to hide the law of philosophy that the Trinity was meant as a
solution of a greater mystery still. In truth, as a matter of philosophy,
the Trinity was intended to explain the eternal and primary problem
of the process by which unity could produce diversity. Starting from
unity alone, philosophers found themselves unable to stir hand or foot
until they could account for duality. To the common, ignorant peasant,
no such trouble occurred, for he knew the Trinity in its simpler form
as the first condition of life, like time and space and force. No human
being was so stupid as not to understand that the father, mother,
and child made a trinity, returning into each other, and although
every father, every mother, and every child, from the dawn of man's
intelligence, had asked why, and had never received an answer more
intelligible to them than to philosphers, they never showed difificulty
in accepting that trinity as a fact. They might even, in their bene-
ficent blindness, ask the Church why that trinity, which had satisfied
the Egyptians for five or ten thousand years, was not good enough
for churchmen. They themselves were doing their utmost, though
unconsciously, to identify the Holy Ghost with the Mother, while
philosophy insisted on excluding the human symbol precisely because
it was human and led back to an infinite series. Philosophy required
three units to start from; it posed the equilateral triangle, not the
straight line, as the foundation of its deometry. The first straight line,
infinite in extension, must be assumed, and its reflection engendered
the second, but whence came the third? Under protest, philosophy

ABfiLARD 305

was compelled to accept the symbol of Father and Son as a matter of
faith, but, if the relation of Father and Son were accepted for the two
units which reflected each other, what relation expressed the Holy
Ghost? In philosophy, the product of two units was not a third unit,
but diversity, multiplicity, infinity. The subject was, for that reason,
better handled by the Arabs, whose reasoning worked back on the
Christian theologists and made the point more delicate still. Common
people, like women and children and ourselves, could never under-
stand the Trinity; naturally, intelligent people understood it still less,
but for them it did not matter; they did not need to understand it pro-
vided their neighbours would leave it alone.

The mass of mankind wanted something nearer to them than either
the Father or the Son; they wanted the Mother, and the Church tried,
in what seems to women and children and ourselves rather a feeble
way, to give the Holy Ghost, as far as possible, the Mother's attributes
— Love, Charity, Grace; but in spite of conscientious effort and un~
swerving faith, the Holy Ghost remained to the mass of Frenchmen
somewhat apart, feared rather than loved. The sin against the Holy
Ghost was a haunting spectre, for no one knew what else it was.

Naturally the Church, and especially its official theologists, took an
instinctive attitude of defence whenever a question on this subject
was asked, and were thrown into a flutter of irritation whenever an
answer was suggested. No man likes to have his intelligence or good
faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself. The dis-
tinguishing essence of the Holy Ghost, as a theological substance, was
its mystery. That this mystery should be touched at all was annoying
to every one who knew the dangers that lurked behind the veil, but
that it should be freely handled before audiences of laymen by persons
of doubtful character was impossible. Such license must end in dis-
crediting the whole Trinity under pretence of making it intelligible.

Precisely this license was what Abelard took, and on it he chose to
insist. He said nothing heretical; he treated the Holy Ghost with

306 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

almost exaggerated respect, as though other churchmen did not quite
appreciate its merits; but he would not let it alone, and the Church
dreaded every moment lest, with his enormous influence in the schools,
he should raise a new storm by his notorious indiscretion. Yet so long
as he merely lectured, he was not molested ; only when he began to
publish his theology did the Church interfere. Then a council held at
Soissons in 1 12 1 abruptly condemned his book in block, without reading
it, without specifying its errors, and without hearing his defence;
obliged him to throw the manuscript into the fire with his own hands,
and finally shut him up in a monastery.

He had invited the jurisdiction by taking orders, but even the
Church was shocked by the summary nature of the judgment, which
seems to have been quite irregular. In fact, the Church has never
known what it was that the council condemned. The latest great work
on the Trinity, by the Jesuit Father de Regnon, suggests that Abe-
lard's fault was in applying to the Trinity his theory of concepts.
"Yes!" he says; "the mystery is explained; the key of conceptualism
has opened the tabernacle, and Saint Bernard was right in saying that,
thanks to Abelard, every one can penetrate it and contemplate it at
his ease; ' even the graceless, even the uncircumcised.' Yes! the Trinity
is explained, but after the manner of the Sabellians. For to identify
the Persons in the terms of human concepts is, in the same stroke, to
destroy their ' subsistances propres.' "

Although the Saviour seems to have felt no compunctions about
identifying the persons of the Trinity in the terms of human concepts,
it is clear that tourists and heretics had best leave the Church to deal
with its " subsistances propres," and with its own members, in its own
way. In sum, the Church preferred to stand firm on the Roman arch,
and the architects seem now inclined to think it was right; that scho-
lastic science and the pointed arch proved to be failures. In the twelfth
century the world may have been rough, but it was not stupid. The
Council of Soissons was held while the architects and sculptors were

AB£LARD 307

building the west porch of Chartres and the Aquilon at Mont-Saint-
Michel. Averroes was born at Cordova in 1126; Omar Khayyam died
at Naishapur in 1123. Poetry and metaphysics owned the world, and
theirquarrel with theology was a private, family dispute. Verysoonthe
tide turned decisively in Ab61ard's favour. Suger, a political prelate, be-
came minister of the King, and in March, 1 122, Abbot of Saint-Denis.
In both capacities he took the part of Ab61ard, released him from
restraint, and even restored to him liberty of instruction, at least be-
yond the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Paris. Ab61ard then took a line of
conduct singularly parallel with that of Bernard. Quitting civilized life
he turned wholly to religion. "When the agreement," he said, "had
been executed by both parties to it, in presence of the King and his
ministers, I next retired within the territory of Troyes, upon a desert
spot which I knew, and on a piece of ground given me by certain per-
sons, I built, with the consent of the bishop of the diocese, a sort of
oratory of reeds and thatch, which I placed under the invocation of the
Holy Trinity. . . . Founded at first in the name of the Holy Trinity,
then placed under its invocation, it was called 'Paraclete' in memory
of my having come there as a fugitive and in my despair having found
some repose in the consolations of divine grace. This denomination
was received by many with great astonishment, and some attacked it
with violence under pretext that it was not permitted to consecrate a
church specially to the Holy Ghost any more than to God the Father,
but that, according to ancient usage, it must be dedicated either to the
Son alone or to the Trinity."

The spot is still called Paraclete, near Nogent-sur-Seine, in the
parish of Quincey about halfway between Fontainebleau and Troyes,
The name Paraclete as applied to the Holy Ghost meant the Consoler,
the Comforter, the Spirit of Love and Grace; as applied to the oratory
by Abelard it meant a renewal of his challenge to theologists, a separa-
tion of the Persons in the Trinity, a vulgarization of the mystery; and,
as his story frankly says, it was so received by many. The spot was

308 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

not so remote but that his scholars could follow him, and he invited
them to do so. They came in great numbers, and he lectured to them.
"In body I was hidden in this spot; but my renown overran the whole
world and filled it with my word." Undoubtedly Abelard taught
theology, and, in defiance of the council that had condemned him,
attempted to define the persons of the Trinity. For this purpose he
had fallen on a spot only fifty or sixty miles from Clairvaux where
Bernard was inspiring a contrary spirit of religion ; he placed himself on
the direct line between Clairvaux and its source at Citeaux near Dijon;
indeed, if he had sought for a spot as central as possible to the active
movement of the Church and the time, he could have hit on none more
convenient and conspicuous unless it were the city of Troyes itself,
the capital of Champagne, some thirty miles away. The proof that he
meant to be aggressive is furnished by his own account of the conse-
quences. Two rivals, he says, one of whom seems to have been Ber-
nard of Clairvaux, took the field against him, "and succeeded in excit-
ing the hostility of certain ecclesiastical and secular authorities, by
charging monstrous things, not only against my faith, but also against
my manner of life, to such a point as to detach from me some of my
principal friends; even those who preserved some affection for me dared
no longer display it, for fear. God is my witness that I never heard of
the union of an ecclesiastical assembly without thinking that its ob-
ject was my condemnation." The Church had good reason, for Ab6-
lard's conduct defied discipline; but far from showing harshness, the
Church this time showed a true spirit of conciliation most creditable
to Bernard. Deeply as the Cistercians disliked and distrusted Abe-
lard, they did not violently suppress him, but tacitly consented to let
the authorities buy his silence with Church patronage.

The transaction passed through Suger's hands, and offered an ordi-
nary example of political customs as old as histor>'. An abbey in
Brittany became vacant; at a hint from the Duke Conan, which may
well b^ supposed to have been suggested from Paris, the monks chose

ABELARD 309

Ab^lard as their new abbot, and sent some of their number to Suger
to request permission for Abelard, who was a monk of Saint-Denis,
to become Abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, near Vannes, in Brittany.
Suger probably intimated to Abelard, with a certain degree of au-
thority, that he had better accept. Abelard, "struck with terror, and
as it were under the menace of a thunderbolt," accepted. Of course
the dignity was in effect banishment and worse, and was so understood
on all sides. The Abbaye-de-Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, though less iso-
lated than Mont-Saint-Michel, was not an agreeable winter residence.
Though situated in Ab^lard's native province of Brittany, only sixty
or eighty miles from his birthplace, it was for him a prison with the
ocean around it and a singularly wild people to deal with ; but he could
have endured his lot with contentment, had not discipline or fear or
pledge compelled him to hold his tongue. From 1 125, when he was sent
to Brittany until 1135 when he reappeared in Paris, he never opened
his mouth to lecture. " Never, as God is my witness, — never would I
have acquiesced in such an offer, had it not been to escape, no matter
how, from the vexations with which I was incessantly overwhelmed."
A great career in the Church was thus opened for him against his
will, and if he did not die an archbishop it was not wholly the fault
of the Church. Already he was a great prelate, the equal in rank of the
Abbe Suger, himself, of Saint-Denis; of Peter the Venerable of Cluny;
of Bernard of Clairvaux. He was in a manner a peer of the realm.
Almost immediately he felt the advantages of the change. Barely
two years passed when, in 1 127, the Abbe Suger, in reforming his sub-
ordinate Abbey of Argenteuil, was obliged to disturb Heloise, then a
sister in that congregation. Abelard was warned of the necessity that
his wife should be protected, and with the assistance of everyone con-
cerned, he was allowed to establish his wife at the Paraclete as head of
a religious sisterhood. "I returned there; I invited H61oifse to come
there with the nuns of her community; and when they arrived, I made
them the entire donation of the oratory and its dependencies. . . . The

310 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

bishops cherished her as their daughter; the abbots as their cister;
the laymen as their mother." This was merely the beginning of her
favour and of his. For ten years they were both of them petted chil-
dren of the Church.

The formal establishment of Heloise at the Paraclete took place in
1 129. In February, 1130, on the death of the Pope at Rome, a schism
broke out, and the cardinals elected two popes, one of whom took the
name of Innocent II, and appealed for support to France. Suger saw
a great political opportunity and used it. The heads of the French
Church agreed in supporting Innocent, and the King summoned a
Church council at Etampes to declare its adhesion. The council met
in the late summer; Bernard of Clairvaux took the lead; Peter the
Venerable, Suger of Saint-Denis, and the Abbot of Saint-Gildas-de-
Rhuys supported him; Innocent himself took refuge at Cluny in Octo-
ber, and on January 20, 1 131, he stopped at the Benedictine Abbey of
Morigny. The Chronicle of the monastery, recording the abbots
present on this occasion, — the Abbot of Morigny itself, of Fevero
sham; of Saint-Lucien of Beauvais, and so forth, — added especially:
"Bernard of Clairvaux, who was then the most famous pulpit orator
in France; and Peter Abelard, Abbot of Saint-Gildas, also a monk and
the most eminent master of the schools to which the scholars of almost
all the Latin races flowed."

Innocent needed popular support; Bernard and Abelard were th«
two leaders of popular opinion in France. To attach them. Innocent
could refuse nothing. Probably Abelard remained with Innocent, but
in any case Innocent gave him, at Auxerre, in the following Novem-
ber, a diploma, granting to Heloise, prioress of the Oratory of the Holy
Trinity, all rights of property over whatever she might possess, against
all assailants; which proves Abelard's favour. At this time he seems to
have taken great interest in the new sisterhood. " I made them more
frequentvisits," he said, "in order to work for their benefit." He worked
so earnestly for their benefit that he scandalized the neighbourhood

AB£LARD 311

and had to argue at unnecessary length his innocence of evil. He went
so far as to express a wish to take refuge among them and to abandon
his abbey in Brittany. He professed to stand in terror of his monks;
he excommunicated them; they paid no attention to him; he appealed
to the Pope, his friend, and Innocent sent a special legate to enforce
their submission "in presence of the Count and the Bishops."

Even since that, they would not keep quiet. And quite recently, since the
expulsion of those of whom I have spoken, when I returned to the abbey, aban-
doning myself to the rest of the brothers who inspired me with less distrust, J
found them even worse than the others. It was no longer a question of poison; it
was the dagger that they now sharpened against my breast. I had great difficulty
in escaping from them under the guidance of one of the neighbouring lords. Simi-
lar fjerils menace me still and every day I see the sword raised over my head. Even
at table I can hardly breathe. . . . This is the torture that I endure every moment
of the day; I, a poor monk, raised to the prelacy, becoming more miserable in
becoming more great, that by my example the ambitious may learn to curb their
greed.

With this, the "Story of Calamity" ends. The allusions to Inno-
cent II seem to prove that it was written not earlier than 1132; the
confession of constant and abject personal fear suggests that it was
written under the shock caused by the atrocious murder of the Prior
of Saint- Victor by the nephews of the Archdeacon of Paris, who had
also been subjected to reforms. This murder was committed a few
miles outside of the walls of Paris, on August 20, 1133. The "Story
of Calamity" is evidently a long plea for release from the restraints
imposed on its author by his position in the prelacy and the tacit, or
possibly the express, contract he had made, or to which he had sub-
mitted, in 1 125. This plea was obviously written in order to serve one
of two purposes: — either to be placed before the authorities whose
consent alone could relieve Abelard from his restraints; or to justify
him in throwing off the load of the Church, and resuming the profes-
sion of schoolman. Supposing the second explanation, the date of
the paper would be more or less closely fixed by John of Salisbury, who
coming to Paris as a student, in 1136, found Abelard lecturing on the

312 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Mont-Sainte-Genevieve; that is to say, not under the license of the
Bishop of Paris or his Chancellor, but independently, in a private school
of his own, outside the walls. " I attached myself to the Palatine Peri-
patician who then presided on the hill of Sainte-Genevi^ve, the doc-
tor illustrious, admired by all. There, at his feet, I received the first
elements of the dialectic art, and according to the measure of my poor
understanding I received with all the avidity of my soul everything
that came from his mouth."

This explanation is hardly reasonable, for no prelate who was
not also a temporal lord would have dared throw off his official duties
without permission from his superiors. In Abelard's case the only
superior to whom he could apply, as Abbot of Saint-Gildas in Brittany,
was probably the Pope himself. In the year 1135 the moment was
exceedingly favourable for asking privileges. Innocent, driven from
Rome a second time, had summoned a council at Pisa for May 30 to
help him. Louis-le-Gros and his minister Suger gave at first no sup-
port to this council, and were overruled by Bernard of Clairvaux who
in a manner drove them into giving the French clergy permission to
attend. The principal archbishops, a number of bishops, and sixteen
abbots went to Pisa in May, 1135, and some one of them certainly
asked Innocent for favours on behalf of Abelard, which the Pope
granted.

The proof is a papal bull, dated in 1136, in favour of Heloise, giving
her the rank and title of Abbess, accompanied by another giving to the
Oratory of the Holy Trinity the rank and name of Monastery of the
Paraclete, a novelty in Church tradition so extraordinary or so shock-
ing that it still astounds churchmen. With this excessive mark of
favour Innocent could have felt little difficulty in giving Abelard the
permission to absent himself from his abbey, and with this permission
in his hands Abelard might have lectured on dialectics to John of
Salisbury in the summer or autumn of 1136. He did not, as far as
known, resume lectures on theology.

AB£LARD 313

Such success might have turned heads much better balanced than
that of Abelard. With the support of the Pope and at least one of the
most prominent cardinals, and with relations at court with the minis-
ters of Louis-le-Gros, AbelcU"d seemed to himself as strong as Bernard
of Clairvaux, and a more popular champion of reform. The year 1 137,
which has marked a date for so many great points in our travels,
marked also the moment of Abelard's greatest vogue. The victory of
Aristotle and the pointed arch seemed assured when Suger effected
the marriage of the young Prince Louis to the heiress Eleanor of
Guienne. The exact moment was stamped on the fagade of his ex-
quisite creation, the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, finished in 1140
and still in part erect. From Saint-Denis to Saint-Sulpice was but a
step. Louis-le-Grand seems to stand close in succession to Louis-le-
Gros.

Fortunately for tourists, the world, restless though it might be,
could not hurry, and Abelard was to know of the pointed arch very
little except its restlessness. Just at the apex of his triumph, August i,
1 137, Louis-le-Gros died. Six months afterwards the anti-pope also
died, the schism ended, and Innocent II needed Abelard's help no more.
Bernard of Clairvaux became Pope and Kng at once. Both Innocent
and Louis-le-Jeune were in a manner his personal creations. The King's
brother Henry, next in succession, actually became a monk at Clair-
vaux not long afterwards. Even the architecture told the same story,
for at Saint- Denis, though the arch might simulate a point, the old
Romanesque lines still assert as firmly as ever their spiritual control.
The fleche that gave the fagade a new spirit was not added until 12 15,
which marks Abelard's error in terms of time.

Once arrived at power, Bernard made short work of all that tried
to resist him. During 1 139 he seems to have been too busy or too
ill to take up the affair of Abelard, but in March, 1140, the at-
tack was opened in a formal letter from William of Saint-Thierry,
who was Bernard's closest friend, bringing charges against Abelard

314 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

before Bernard and the Bishop of Chartres. The charges were simple

enough: —

Pierre Ab61ard seized the moment, when all the masters of ecclesiastical doc-
trine have disappeared from the scene of the world, to conquer a place apart, for
himself, in the schools, and to create there an exclusive domination. He treats
Holy Scripture as though it were dialectics. It is a matter with him of per-
sonal invention and annual novelties. He is the censor and not the disciple of the
faith ; the corrector and not the imitator of the authorized masters.

In substance, this is all. The need of action was even simpler.
Abelard's novelties were becoming a danger; they affected not only the
schools, but also even the Curia at Rome. Bernard must act because
there was no one else to act: "This man fears you; he dreads you!
if you shut your eyes, whom will he fear? . . . The evil has become
too public to allow a correction limited to amicable discipline and secret
warning." In fact, Abelard's works were flying about Europe in every
direction, and every year produced a novelty. One can still read them
in M. Cousin's collected edition; among others, a volume on ethics:
"Ethica, seu Scito teipsum"; on theology in general, an epitome; a
"Dialogus inter Philosophum, Judaeum et Christianum " ; and, what
was perhaps the most alarming of all, an abstract of quotations from
standard authorities, on the principle of the parallel column, showing
the fatal contradictions of the authorized masters, and entitled "Sic
et Non" ! Not one of these works but dealt with sacred matters in a
spirit implying that the Essence of God was better understood by
Pierre du Pallet than by the whole array of bishops and prelates in
Europe! Had Bernard been fortunate enough to light upon the "Story
of Calamity," which must also have been in existence, he would have
found there Abelard's own childlike avowal that he taught theology
because his scholars "said that they did not want mere words; that
one can believe only what one understands; and that it is ridiculous
to preach to others what one understands no better than they do."
Bernard himself never charged Abelard with any presumption equal
to this, Bernard said only that "he sees nothing as an enigma, nothing

ABfiLARD 315

as in a mirror, but looks on everything face to face." If this had Leen
all, even Bernard could scarcely have complained. For several thou-
sand years mankind has stared Infinity in the face without pretending
to be the wiser; the pretension of Ab61ard was that, by his dialectic
method, he could explain the Infinite, while all other theologists talked
mere words; and by way of proving that he had got to the bottom
of the matter, he laid down the ultimate law of the universe as his
starting-point: "All that God does," he said, "He wills necessarily
and does it necessarily; for His goodness is such that it pushes Him
necessarily to do all the good He can, and the best He can, and the
quickest He can. . . . Therefore it is of necessity that God willed and
made the world." Pure logic admitted no contingency; it was
bound to be necessitarian or ceased to be logical ; but the result, as
Bernard understood it, was that Ab^lard's world, being the best and
only possible, need trouble itself no more about God, or Church, or
man.

Strange as the paradox seems. Saint Bernard and Lord Bacon,
though looking at the world from opposite standpoints, agreed in this;
that the scholastic method was false and mischievous, and that the
longer it was followed, the greater was its mischief. Bernard thought
that because dialectics led wrong, therefore faith led right. He saw no
alternative, and perhaps in fact there was none. If he had lived a
century later, he would have said to Thomas Aquinas what he said to
a schoolman of his own day: " If you had once tasted true food," — if
you knew what true religion is, — "how quick you would leave those
Jew makers of books (literatoribus judaeis) to gnaw their crusts by
themselves!" Locke or Hume might perhaps still have resented a
little the " literator judaeus," but Faraday or Clerk- Maxwell would
have expressed the same opinion with only the change of a word:
" If the twelfth century had once tasted true science, how quick they
would have dropped Avicenna and Averroes!" Science admits that
Bernard's disbelief in scholasticism was well founded, whatever it may

3i6 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

think of his reasons. The only point that remains is personal : Which is
the more sympathetic, Bernard or Abelard?

The Church feels no doubt, but is a bad witness. Bernard is not a
character to be taken or rejected in a lump. He was many-sided, and
even toward Abelard he showed more than one surface. He wanted no
unnecessary scandals in the Church ; he had too many that were not of
his seeking. He seems to have gone through the forms of friendly
negotiation with Abelard although he could have required nothing
less than Abelard's submission and return to Brittany, and silence;
terms which Abelard thought worse than death. On Abelard's refusal,
Bernard began his attack. We know, from the "Story of Calamity,"
what Bernard's party could not have certainly known then, — the
abject terror into which the very thought of a council had for twenty
years thrown Abelard whenever he was threatened with it; and in 1 140
he saw it to be inevitable. He preferred to face it with dignity, and
requested to be heard at a council to meet at Sens in June. One cannot
admit that he felt the shadow of a hope to escape. At the utmost he
could have dreamed of nothing more than a hearing. Bernard's friends,
who had a lively fear of his dialectics, took care to shut the door on
even this hope. The council was carefully packed and overawed. The
King was present; archbishops, bishops, abbots, and other prelates
by the score; Bernard acted in person as the prosecuting attorney; the
public outside were stimulated to threaten violence. Abelard had less
chance of a judicial hearing than he had had at Soissons twenty years
before. He acted with a proper sense of their dignity and his own by
simply appearing and entering an appeal to Rome. The council paid
no attention to the appeal, but passed to an immediate condemnation.
His friends said that it was done after dinner; that when the volume
of Abelard's "Theology" was produced and the clerk began to read it
aloud, after the first few sentences the bishops ceased attention, talked,
joked, laughed, stamped their feet, got angry, and at last went to sleep.
They were waked only to growl " Damnamus — namus," and so made

AB£LARD 317

an end. The story may be true, for all prelates, even in the twelfth
century, were not Bernards of Clairvaux or Peters of Cluny; all drank
wine, and all were probably sleepy after dinner; while Abelard's writ-
ings are, for the most part, exceedingly hard reading. The clergy knew
quite well what they were doing; the judgment was certain long in
advance, and the council was called only to register it. Political trials
were usually mere forms.

The appeal to Rome seems to have been taken seriously by Ber-
nard, which is surprising unless the character of Innocent II inspired
his friends with doubts unknown to us. Innocent owed everything to
Bernard, while Abelard owed everything to Innocent. The Pope was
not in a position to alienate the French Church or the French King.
To any one who knows only what is now to be known, Bernard seems
to have been sure of the Curia, yet he wrote in a tone of excitement as
though he feared Abelard's influence there even more than at home.
He became abusive; Abelard was a crawling viper (coluber tortuosus)
who had come out of his hole (egressus estde caverna sua), and after
the manner of a hydra (in similitudinem hydrae), after having one
head cut off at Soissons, had thrown out seven more. He was a monk
without rule; a prelate without responsibility; an abbot without dis-
cipline; "disputing with boys; conversing with women." The charges
in themselves seem to be literally true, and would not in some later
centuries have been thought very serious; neither faith nor morals were
impugned. On the other hand, Abelard never affected or aspired to be
a saint, while Bernard always affected to judge the acts and motives
of his fellow-creatures from a standpoint of more than worldly charity.
Bernard had no right to Abelard's vices; he claimed to be judged by
a higher standard; but his temper was none of the best, and his pride
was something of the worst; which gave to Peter the Venerable occa-
sion for turning on him sharply with a rebuke that cut to the bone:
"You perform all the difficult religious duties," wrote Peter to the
saint who wrought miracles; " you fast; you watch; you suffer; but you

3i8 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

will not endure the easy ones — you do not love (non vis levia ferre,
ut diligas)."

This was the end of Abelard. Of course the Pope confirmed the
judgment, and even hurried to do so in order that he might not be
obliged to give Abelard a hearing. The judgment was not severe, as
judgments went; indeed, it amounted to little more than an order to
keep silence, and, as it happened, was never carried into effect. Ab6-
lard, at best a nervous invalid, started for Rome, but stopped at
Cluny, perhaps the most agreeable stopping-place in Europe. Person-
ally he seems to have been a favourite of Abbot Peter the Venerable,
whose love for Bernard was not much stronger than Abelard's or
Suger's. Bernard was an excessively sharp critic, and spared worldli-
ness, or what he thought lack of spirituality, in no prelate whatever;
Clairvaux existed for nothing else, politically, than as a rebuke to them
all, and Bernard's enmity was their bond of union. Under the pro-
tection of Peter the Venerable, the most amiable figure of the twelfth
century, and in the most agreeable residence in Europe, Abelard re-
mained unmolested at Cluny, occupied, as is believed, in writing or
revising his treatises, in defiance of the council. He died there two
years later, April 21, 1 142, in full communion, still nominal Abbot of
Saint-Gildas, and so distinguished a prelate that Peter the Venerable
thought himself obliged to write a charming letter to H^loise at the
Paraclete not far away, condoling with heron the loss of a husband who
was the Socrates, the Aristotle, the Plato, of France and the West;
who, if among logicians he had rivals, had no master; who was the
prince of study, learned, eloquent, subtle, penetrating; who overcame
everything by the force of reason, and was never so great as when he
passed to true philosophy, that of Christ.

All this was in Latin verses, and seems sufficiently strong, consider-
ing that Abelard's philosophy had been so recently and so emphatically
condemned by the entire Church, including Peter the Venerable him-
self. The twelfth century had this singular charm of liberty in practice,

ABELARD 319

just as its architecture knew no mathematical formula of precision;
but Peter's letter to H61oise went further still, and rang with absolute
passion : —

Thus, dear and venerable sister in God, he to whom you are united, after your
tie in the flesh, by the better and stronger bond of the divine love; he, with whom,
and under whom, you have served the Lord, the Lord now takes, in your place,
like another you, and warms in His bosom; and, for the day of His coming, when
shall sound the voice of the archangel and the trumpet of God descending from
heaven, He keeps him to restore him to you by His grace.

CHAPTER XV

THE MYSTICS

THE schoolmen of the twelfth century thought they could reach
God by reason; the Council of Sens, guided by Saint Bernard,
replied that the effort was futile and likely to be mischievous. The
council made little pretence of knowing or caring what method Abe-
lard followed; they condemned any effort at all on that line; and no
sooner had Bernard silenced the Abbot of Saint-Gildas for innova-
tion than he turned about and silenced the Bishop of Poitiers for con-
servatism. Neither in the twelfth nor in any other century could three
men have understood alike the meaning of Gilbert de la Poree, who
seems to one high authority unworthy of notice and to another, worthy
of an elaborate but quite unintelligible commentary. When M. Rous-
selet and M. Haureau judge so differently of a voluminous writer, the
Council at Rheims which censured Bishop Gilbert in 1 148 can hardly
have been clear in mind. One dare hazard no more than a guess at
Gilbert's offence, but the guess is tolerably safe that he, like Abelard,
insisted on discussing and analyzing the Trinity. Gilbert seems to have
been a rigid realist, and he reduced to a correct syllogism the idea of
the ultimate substance — God. To make theology a system capable
of scholastic definition he had to suppose, behind the active deity, a
passive abstraction, or absolute substance without attributes; and then
the attributes — justice, mercy, and the rest — fell into rank as
secondary substances. "Formam dei divinitatem appellant." Ber-
nard answered him by insisting with his usual fiery conviction that
the Church should lay down the law, once for all, and inscribe it with
iron and diamond, that Divinity — Divine Wisdom — is God. In
philosophy and science the question seems to be still open. Whether

THE MYSTICS 321

anything ultimate exists — whether substance is more than a complex
of elements — whether the "thing in itself " is a reaHty or a name — is
a question that Faraday and Clerk-Maxwell seem to answer as Ber-
nard did, while Haeckel answers it as Gilbert did; but in theology
even a heretic wonders how a doubt was possible. The absolute sub-
stance behind the attributes seems to be pure Spinoza.

This supposes that the heretic understands what Gilbert or Haeckel
meant, which is certainly a mistake; but it is possible that he may see
in part what Bernard meant and this is enough if it is all. Ab61ard's
necessitarianism and Gilbert's Spinozism, if Bernard understood
them right, were equally impossible theology, and the Church could
by no evasion escape the necessity of condemning both. Unfortunately,
Bernard could not put his foot down so roughly on the schools without
putting it on Aristotle as well; and, for at least sixty years after the
Council of Rheims, Aristotle was either tacitly or expressly prohibited.
One cannot stop to explain why Aristotle himself would have been first
to forbid the teaching of what was called by his name in the Middle
Ages; but you are bound to remember that this period between 1 140
and 1200 was that of Transition architecture and art. One must go
to Noyon, Soissons, and Laon to study the Church that trampled on
the schools; one must recall how the peasants of Normandy and the
Chartrain were crusading for the Virgin in 1145, and building her
fleches at Chartres and Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives while Bernard was
condemning Gilbert at Rheims in 1148; we must go to the poets to
see what they all meant by it; but the sum is an emotion — clear and
strong as love and much clearer than logic — whose charm lies in its
unstable balance. The Transition is the equilibrium between the
love of God — which is faith — and the logic of God — which is rea-
son; between the round arch and the pointed. One may not be sure
which pleases most, but one need not be harsh toward people who
think that the moment of balance is exquisite. The last and highest
moment is seen at Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the

322 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

constant doubt whether emotion or science is uppermost. At Amiens,
doubt ceases; emotion is trained in school; Thomas Aquinas reigns.

Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of Aquino were both artists, —
very great artists, if the Church pleases, — and one need not decide
which was the greater; but between them is a region of pure emotion
— of poetry and art — which is more interesting than either. In every
age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beat-
ing against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indif-
ference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true
saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who
has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were
at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in scholasticism; so
was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his
scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement
to relieve its restlessness. His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm
faded; God came no nearer. If there was in all France, between 1140
and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England
type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a
description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the
picture painted by Abelard, his old master, of the century at its
beginning. John weighed Abelard and the schools against Bernard and
the cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth led rather
through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 11 76,
and to a mild scepticism in faith. " I prefer to doubt," he said, " rather
than rashly define what is hidden." The battle with the schools had
then resulted only in creating three kinds of sceptics: — the disbe-
lievers in human reason; the passive agnostics; and the sceptics proper,
who would have been atheists had they dared. The first class was rep-
resented by the School of Saint- Victor; the second by John of Salis-
bury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cor-
nificii, as though they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma
on which to fix their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether

THE MYSTICS 323

a pig which was led to market was led by the man or the cord. One
asks instantly: What cord? — whether Grace, for instance, or Free
Will?

Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to
reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its best
practical use was to teach charity — love. Even the early, superficial
debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the subject that
the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing
further those lines of thought. The twelfth century had already reached
the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes re-
newed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his
celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum." Although that ultimate fact seemed
new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his
demonstration, it was as old and familiar as Saint Augustine to the
twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of
the Ego or the Non-Ego. The schools argued, according to their tastes,
from unity to multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what
they wanted was to connect the two. They tried realism and found
that it led to pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it
ended in materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism
which begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted.
In the seventeenth century the same violent struggle broke out again,
and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the
French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of
the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century
of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Des-
cartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions
of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of
God: " I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God
and He must exist," Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he
doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the impossibility of rejecting
man's reason by reason ; unconsciously sceptical, he forced himself to

324

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God. Man had
tried to prove God, and had failed: "The metaphysical proofs of
God are so remote (61oign6es) from the reasoning of men, and so con-
tradictory (impliqu6es, far-fetched) that they make little impression;
and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be
during the instant that they see the demonstration ; an hour after-
wards they fear to have deceived themselves." Moreover, this kind
of proof could lead only to a speculative knowledge, and to know
God only in that way was not to know Him at all. The only way to
reach God was to deny the value of reason, and to deny reason was
scepticism : —

En voyant I'aveuglement et la misere de
I'homme et ces contrari6t6s 6tonnantes qui se
d6couvrent dans sa nature; et regardant tout
I'univers muet, et rhomme sans lumiere,
abandonn6 a lui-mSme et comme ^gar6 dans
ce recoin de I'univers, sans savoir qui I'y a mis,
ce qu'il y est venu faire, ce qu'il deviendra
en mourant; j'entre en e£froi comme un homme
qu'on aurait porte endormi dans une 5Ie d6serte
et effroyable, et qui s'eveillerait sans connaltre
oii il est et sans avoir aucun moyen d'en sortir.
Et sur cela j'admire comment on n'entre pas
en desespoir d'un si miserable 6tat. Je vois
d'autres personnes aupres de moi de semblable
nature, et je leur demande s'ils sont mieux
instruits que moi, et ils me disent que non.
Et sur cela, ces miserables 6gar6s, ayant re-
gard6 autour d'eux, et ayant vu quelques ob-
jets plaisants, s'y sont donnfis et s'y sont at-
taches. Pour moi je n'ai pu m'y arreter ni me
reposer dans la soci6tfi deces personnes, en tout
semblables a moi, mis6rables comme moi, im-
puissants comme moi. Je vois qu'ils ne m'aide-
raient pas 3. mourir; je mourrai seul; il faut
done faire comme si j'fitaisseul: or, si j'€taisseul,
je ne bitirais pas des maisons; je ne m'embar-
rasserais point dans des occupations tumul-
tuaires; je ne chercherais I'estime de personne,
mais je t&cherais seulement k d£couvrir la
v6rit6.

When I see the blindness and misery of man
and the astonishing contradictions revealed
in his nature; and observe the whole universe
mute, and man without light, abandoned to
himself, as though lost in this corner of the
universe, without knowing who put him here,
or what he has come here to do, or what will
become of him in dying; I feel fear like a man
who has been carried when asleep into a desert
and fearful island, and has waked without know-
ing where he is and without having means of
rescue. And thereupon I wonder how man es-
capes despair at so miserable an estate. I see
others about me, like myself, and I ask them if
they are better informed than I, and they tell
me no. And then these wretched wanderers,
after looking about them and seeing some
pleasant object, have given themselves up and
attached themselves to it. As for me, I carmot
stop there, or rest in the company of these per-
sons, wholly like myself, miserable like me, im-
potent like me. I see that they would not help
me to die; I shall die alone; I must then act as
though alone; but if I were alone I should not
build houses; I should not fret myself with bus-
tling occupations; I should seek the esteem of
no one, but I should try only to discover the
truth.

THE MYSTICS 325

Ainsi, consid^rant combien il y a d'appa- So, considering how much appearance there

rence qu'il y a autre chose que ce que je vois, is that something exists other than what I see,

j'ai recherche si ce Dieu dont tout le monde I have sought whether this God of Whom every

parle n'aurait pas laisse quelques marques de one talks may not have left some marks of

lui. Je regarde de toutes parts et ne vois par- Himself. I search everywhere, and see only

tout qu' obscurite. La nature ne m'offre rien obscurity everywhere. Nature offers me ncv

que ne soit matiere de doute et d'inquietude. thing but matter of possible doubt and dis-

Si je n'y voyais rien qui marquSt une divinitd, quiet. If I saw there nothing tomark a divinity,

je me determinerais a n'en rien croire. Si je I should make up my mind to believe nothing

voyais partout les marques d'un Crfiateur, je of it. If I saw everywhere the marks of a

me reposerais en paix dans la foi. Mais voyant Creator, I should rest in peace in faith. But

trop pour nier, et trop peu f)our m'assurer, seeingtoomuch to deny,and too little to affirm,

je suis dans un etat a plaindre, et oil j'ai I am in a pitiable state, where I have an hun-

souhait^ cent fois que si \m Dieu soutient la dred times wished that, if a God supports na-

nature, elle le marqu&t sans Equivoque; et que, ture, she would show it without equivocation;

si les marques qu' elle en donnesont trompeuses, and that, if the marks she gives are deceptive,

elle les supprimat tout a fait; qu'elle dit tout she would suppress them wholly; that she say

ou rien, afin que je visse quel parti je dois all or nothing, that I may see my path,
suivre.

This is the true Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place
it refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but
precision; it has but one real home — the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor.
The mind that recoils from itself can only commit a sort of ecstatic
suicide; it must absorb itself in God; and in the bankruptcy of
twelfth-century science the Western Christian seemed actually on
the point of attainment; he, like Pascal, touched God behind the veil
of scepticism.

The schools had already proved one or two points which need never
have been discussed again. In essence, religion was love; in no case
was it logic. Reason can reach nothing except through the senses;
God, by essence, cannot be reached through the senses; if He is to be
known at all, He must be known by contact of spirit with spirit,
essence with essence; directly; by emotion; by ecstasy; by absorp-
tion of our existence in His; by substitution of his spirit for ours.
The world had no need to wait five hundred years longer in order to
hear this same result reaffirmed by Pascal. Saint Francis of Assisi had
affirmed it loudly enough, even if the voice of Saint Bernard had been

326

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

less powerful than it was. The Virgin had asserted it in tones more
gentle, but any one may still see how convincing, who stops a moment
to feel the emotion that lifted her wonderful Chartres spire up to
God.

The Virgin, indeed, made all easy, for it was little enough she cared
for reason or logic. She cared for her baby, a simple matter, which any
woman could do and understand. That, and the grace of God, had
made her Queen of Heaven. The Trinity had its source in her, —
totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium, — and she was maternity. She
was also poetry and art. In the bankruptcy of reason, she alone was
real.

So Guillaume de Champeaux, half a century dead, came to life
again in another of his creations. His own Abbey of Saint-Victor,
where Abelard had carried on imaginary disputes with him, became the
dominant school. As far as concerns its logic, we had best pass it by.
The Victorians needed logic only to drive away logicians, which was
hardly necessary after Bernard had shut up the schools. As for its
mysticism, all training is much alike in idea, whether one follows the
six degrees of contemplation taught by Richard of Saint-Victor, or the
eightfold noble way taught by Gautama Buddha. The theology of
the school was still less important, for the Victorians contented them-
selves with orthodoxy only in the sense of caring as little for dogma
as for dialectics; their thoughts were fixed on higher emotions. Not
Richard the teacher, but Adam the poet, represents the school to us,
and when Adam dealt with dogma he frankly admitted his ignorance
and hinted his indifference; he was, as always, conscientious; but he
was not always, or often, as cold. His statement of the Trinity is a
marvel ; but two verses of it are enough : —

Digne loqui de personis
Vim transcendit rationis,

Excedit ingenia.
^d sit gigni, quid processus.

Of the Trinity to reason
Leads to license or to treason

Punishment deserving.
What is birth and what processioo

THE MYSTICS

327

Me nescire sum professus,
Sed fide non dubia.

Qui sic credit, non festinet,
£t a via non declinet

Insolenter regia.
Servet fidem, formet mores,
Nee attendat ad errores

Quos damnat Ecclesia.

Is not mine to make profession,
Save with faith unswerving.

Thus professing, thus believing,
Never insolently leaving

The highway of our faith,
Duty weighing, law obeying,
Never shall we wander straying

Where heresy is death.

Such a school took natural refuge in the Holy Ghost and the Virgin,
— Grace and Love, — but the Holy Ghost, as usual, profited by it
much less than the Virgin. Comparatively little of Adam's poetry is
expressly given to the Saint Esprit, and too large a part of this has a
certain flavour of dogma: —

Qui procedis ab utroque
Genitore Genitoque
Pariter, Paraclite!

Amor Patris, Filiique
Par amborum et utrique
Compar et consimilisi

The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the
Son; neither made nor created nor begotten,
but proceeding.

The whole three Persons are coetemal to-
gether; and coequal.

This sounds like a mere versification of the Creed, yet when Adam
ceased to be dogmatic and broke into true prayer, his verse added a
lofty beauty even to the Holy Ghost; a beauty too serious for modern

rhyme :

Oh, juvamen oppressorum,
Oh, solamen miserorum,

Pauperum refugium.
Da contemptum terrenoruml
Ad amorem supemorum

Trahe desideriumi

Gonsolator et fundator,
Habitator et amator,

Cordium humilium,
Pelle mala, terge sordes,
Et discordes fac Concordes,

£t affer presidium 1

Oh, helper of the heavy-laden,
Oh, solace of the miserable.

Of the poor, the refuge,
Give contempt of earthly pleasures!
To the love of heavenly treasures

Lift our hearts' desire 1

Consolation and foundation.
Dearest friend and habitation

Of the lowly-hearted,
Dispel our evil, cleanse our foulness,
And our discords turn to concord,

And bring us succour!

328

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Adam's scholasticism was the most sympathetic form of mediaeval
philosophy. Even in prose, the greatest writers have not often suc-
ceeded in stating simply and clearly the fact that infinity can make
itself finite, or that space can make itself bounds, or that eternity
can generate time. In verse, Adam did it as easily as though he were
writing any other miracle, — as Gaultier de Coincy told the Virgin's,
— and any one who thinks that the task was as easy as it seems, has
only to try it and see whether he can render into a modern tongue any
single word which shall retain the whole value of the word which
Adam has chosen : —

Ne periret homo reus
Redemptorem misit Deus,

Pater unigenitum;
Visitavit quos amavit
Nosque vitae revocavit

Gratia non meritum.

To death condemned by awful sentence,
God recalled us to repentance,

Sending His only Son;
Whom He loved He came to cherish;
Whom His justice doomed to perish,

By grace to life He won.

Infinitus et Immensus,
Quem non capit ullus sensus

Nee locorum spatia,
Ex eterno temporalis,
Ex immenso fit localis,

Ut restauret omnia.

Infinity, Immensity,

Whom no human eye can see

Or human thought contain,
Made of Infinity a space,
Made of Immensity a place.

To win us Life again.

The English verses, compared with the Latin, are poor enough, with
the canting jingle of a cheap religion and a thin philosophy, but by
contrast and comparison they give higher value to the Latin. One feels
the dignity and religious quality of Adam's chants the better for trying
to give them an equivalent. One would not care to hazard such ex-
periments on poetry of the highest class like that of Dante and Pe-
trarch, but Adam was conventional both in verse and thought, and
aimed at obtaining his effects from the skilful use of the Latin sonori-
ties for the purposes of the chant. With dogma and metaphysics he
dealt boldly and even baldly as he was required to do, and successfully
as far as concerned the ear or the voice; but poetry was hardly made for

THE MYSTICS 329

dogma; even the Trinity was better expressed mathematically than by
rhythm. With the stronger emotions, such as terror, Adam was still
conventional, and showed that he thought of the chant more than of
the feeling and exaggerated the sound beyond the value of the sense.
He could never have written the "Dies Irae." He described the ship-
wreck of the soul in magnificent sounds without rousing an emotion
of fear; the raging waves and winds that swept his bark past the abysses
and up to the sky were as conventional as the sirens, the dragons, the
dogs, and the pirates that lay in wait. The mast nodded as usual;
the sails were rent; the sailors ceased work; all the machinery was
classical ; only the prayer to the Virgin saved the poetry from sinking
like the ship; and yet, when chanted, the effect was much ^too fine
to bear translation : —

Ave, Virgo singularis,
Mater nostri Salutaris,
QusB vocaris Stella Maris,

Stella non erratica;
Nos in hujus vitx mari
Non permitte naufragari,
Sed pro nobis Salutari

Tuo semper supplical

Ssevit mare, fremunt venti,
Fluctus surgimt turbulenti;
Navis currit, sed currenti

Tot occummt obvia!
Hie sirenes voluptatis,
Draco, canes cum piratis,
Mortem pene desperatis

Hsec intentant omnia.

Post abyssos, nunc ad ccelum
Furens unda fert phaselum;
Nutat malus, fluit velum,

Nautae cessat opera;
Contabescit in his malis
Homo noster animalis;
Tu nos. Mater spin talis,

Pereuntes liberal

330 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Finer still is the famous stanza sung at Easter, in which Christ rises,
the Lion of Judah, in the crash of the burst gates of death, at the roar
of the Father Lion : —

Sic de Juda, leo fortis,
Fractis portis dirae mortis,

Die surgens tertia,
Rugiente voce patris
Ad supernJB sinum matris

Tot revexit spolia.

For terror or ferocity or images of pain, the art of the twelfth
century had no use except to give a higher value to their images of
love. The figures on the west portal of Chartres are alive with the
spirit of Adam's poetry, but it is the spirit of the Virgin. Like Saint
Bernard, Adam lavished his affections on Mary, and even more than
Saint Bernard he could claim to be her poet-laureate. Bernard was not
himself author of the hymn "Stella Maris" which brought him the
honour of the Virgin's personal recognition, but Adam was author of a
dozen hymns in which her perfections were told with equal fervour,
and which were sung at her festivals. Among these was the famous

Salve, Mater Pietatis,
Et totius Trinitatis
Nobile Triclinium!

a compliment sorefinedandyet so excessive that the Venerable Thomas
Cantimpratensis who died a century later, about 1280, related in his
"Apiarium" that when "venerabilis Adam" wrote down these lines,
Mary herself appeared to him and bent her head in recognition. Al-
though the manuscripts do not expressly mention this miracle, they
do contain, at that stanza, a curious note expressing an opinion, ap-
parently authorized by the prior, that, if the Virgin had seen fit to
recognize the salutation of the Venerable Adam in this manner, she
would have done only what he merited: "ab ea resalutari et regratiari
meruit."

Adam's poems are still on the shelves of most Parisian bookshops,
as common as "Aucassins" and better known than much poetry of our
own time; for the mediaeval Latin rhymes have a delightful sonority

THE MYSTICS 331

and simplicity that keep them popular because they were not made to
be read but to be sung. One does not forget their swing: —

Infinitus et Immensus;

or —

Oh, juvamen oppressonun;
or —

Consolatrix miserorum
Suscitatrix mortuorum.

The organ rolls through them as solemnly as ever it did in the Abbey
Church; but in mediaeval art so much more depends on the mass than
on the measure — on the dignity than on the detail — that equivalents
are impossible. Even Walter Scott was content to translate only
three verses of the " Dies Irae." At best, Viollet-le-Duc could reproduce
only a sort of modern Gothic ; a more or less effaced or affected echo of
a lost emotion which the world never felt but once and never could feel
again. Adam composed a number of hymns to the Virgin, and, in them
all, the feeling counts for more, by far, than the sense. Supposing we
choose the simplest and try to give it a modern version, aiming to show,
by comparison, the difference of sound; one can perhaps manage to
recover a little of the simplicity, but give it the grand style one cannot;
or, at least, if any one has ever done both, it is Walter Scott, and merely
by placing side by side the "Dies Irae" and his translation of it, one
can see at a glance where he was obliged to sacrifice simplicity only to
obtain sound: —

Dies hx, dies ilia, That day of wrath, that dreadful day,

Solvet seclum in favilla. When heaven and earth shall pass away,

Teste David ciim Sibylla. What power shall be the sinner's stay?

How shall he meet that dreadful day?
Quantus tremor est futurus,
Quando judex est venturus,
Cuncta stricte discussurusi When shrivelling like a parched scroll

The flaming heavens together roll;
Tuba mirum spargens sonum When louder yet and yet more dread

Per sepulchra regionum. Swells the high trump that wakes the dead.

Coget omnes ante thronum.

As translation the last line is artificial.

332

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

The "Dies Irae" does not belong, in spirit, to the twelfth century;
it is sombre and gloomy like the Last Judgments on the thirteenth-
century portals ; it does not love. Adam loved. His verses express the
Virgin; they are graceful, tender, fervent, and they hold the same dig-
nity which cannot be translated : —

In bac valle lacrimarum
Nihil duke, nihil carum,

Suspecta sunt omnia;
Quid hie nobis erit tutum,
Cum nee ipsa vel virtutum

Tula sit victoria!

Caro nobis adversatur,
Mundus earni suffragatur

In nostram perniciem;
Hostis instat, nos infestans,
Nune se palam manifestans,

Nunc occultans rabiem.

Et peccamus et punimur,
Et diversis irretimur

Laqueis venantium.
0 Maria, mater Dei,
Tu, post Deum, summa spei,

Tu dulee refugium;

Tot et tantis irretiti,
Non valemus his reniti

Ne vi nee industria;
Consolatrix miserorum,
Suscitatrix mortuorum,

Mortis rompe retia!

In this valley full of tears.
Nothing softens, nothing cheers,

All is suspected lure;
What safety can we hope for, here,
When even virtue faints for fear

Her victory be not sure!

Within, the flesh a traitor is.
Without, the world encompasses,

A deadly wound to bring.
The foe is greedy for our spoils,
Now clasping us within his eoils.

Or hiding now his sting.

We sin, and penalty must pay.

And we are caught, like beasts of prey,

Within the hunter's snares.
Nearest to God! oh Mary Mother!
Hope can reach us from none other.

Sweet refuge from our eares;

We have no strength to struggle longer,
For our bonds are more and stronger

Than our hearts can bear!
You who rest the heavy-laden.
You who lead lost souls to Heaven,

Burst the hunter's snare!

The art of this poetry of love and hope, which marked the mystics,
lay of course in the background of shadows which marked the cloister.
"Inter vania nihil vanius est homine." Man is an imperceptible
atom always trying to become one with God. If ever modern science
achieves a definition of energy, possibly it may borrow the figure:
Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.
Adam's poetry was an expression of the effort to reach absorption

THE MYSTICS 333

through love, not through fear; but to do this thoroughly he had to
make real to himself his own nothingness; most of all, to annihilate
pride; for the loftiest soul can comprehend that an atom, — say, of
hydrogen, — which is proud of its personality, will never merge in a
molecule of water. The familiar verse: "Oh, why should the spirit of
mortal be proud?" echoes Adam's epitaph to this day: —

Haeres peccati, natura filius iras, Heir of sin, by nature son of wrath,

Exiliique reus nascitur omnis homo. Condemned to exile, every man is bom.

Unde superbit homo, cujus conceptio culpa, ^\^lence is man's pride, whose conception fault,
Nasci poena, labor vita, necesse mori? Birth pain, life labour, and whose death is

sure?

Four concluding lines, not by him, express him even better: —

Hie ego qui jaceo, miser et miserabilis Adam,

Unam pro summo mimere posco precem.
Peccavi, fateor; veniam peto; parce fatenti;

Parce, pater: fratres, parcite; parce, DeusI

One does not conceive that Adam insisted so passionately on his
sins because he thought them — or himself — important before the
Infinite. Chemistry does not consider an atom of oxygen as in itself
important, yet if it wishes to get a volume of pure gas, it must separate
the elements. The human soul was an atom that could unite with God
only as a simple element. The French mystics showed in their mysti-
cism the same French reasonableness; the sense of measure, of logic,
of science; the allegiance to form; the transparency of thought, which
the French mind has always shown on its surface like a shell of nacre.
The mystics were in substance rather more logical than the schoolmen
and much more artistic in their correctness of line and scale. At bot-
tom, French saints were not extravagant. One can imagine a Byzan-
tine asserting that no French saint was ever quite saintly. Their aims
and ideals were very high, but not beyond reaching and not unreason-
able. Drag the French mind as far from line and logic as space permits,
the instant it is freed it springs back to the classic and tries to look
consequent.

334 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

This paradox, that the French mystics were never mystical, runs
through all our travels, so obstinately recurring in architecture, sculp-
ture, legend, philosophy, religion, and poetry, that it becomes tiresome;
and yet it is an idea that, in spite of Matthew Arnold and many
other great critics, never has got lodgment in the English or German
mind, and probably never will. Every one who loves travel will hope
that it never may. If you are driven to notice it as the most distinctive
mark of French art, it is not at all for the purpose of arguing a doubt-
ful law, but only in order to widen the amusement of travel. We set
out to travel from Mont-Saint-Michel to Chartres, and no farther;
there we stop ; but we may still look across the boundary to Assisi for
a specimen of Italian Gothic architecture, a scheme of colour decora-
tion, or still better for a mystic to compare with the Bernadines and
Victorians. Every one who knows anything of religion knows that
the ideal mystic saint of western Europe was Francis of Assisi, and
that Francis, though he loved France, was as far as possible from be-
ing French; though not in the least French, he was still the finest flower
from the French mediaeval garden; and though the French mystics
could never have understood him, he was what the French mystics
would have liked to be or would have thought they liked to be as long
as they knew him to be not one of themselves. As an Italian or as a
Spaniard, Francis was in harmony with his world; as a Frenchman,
he would have been out of place even at Clairvaux, and still more
among his own Cordeliers at the doors of the Sorbonne.

Francis was born in 1186, at the instant when French art was cul-
minating, or about to culminate, in the new cathedrals of Laon and
Chartres, on the ruins of scholastic religion and in the full summer of
the Courts of Love. He died in 1226, just as Queen Blanche became
Regent of France and when the Cathedral of Beauvais was planned.
His life precisely covered the most perfect moment of art and feeling
in the thousand years of pure and confident Christianity. To an
emotional nature like his, life was still a phantasm or "concept" of

THE MYSTICS 335

crusade against real or imaginary enemies of God, with the "Chanson
de Roland" for a sort of evangel, and a feminine ideal for a passion.
He chose for his mistress "domina nostra paupertas," and the rules of
his order of knighthood were as visionary as those of Saint Bernard
were practical. " Isti sunt fratres mei milites tabulae rotundae, qui
latitant in desertis"; his Knights of the Round Table hid themselves
for their training in deserts of poverty, simplicity, humility, innocence
of self, absorption in nature, in the silence of God, and, above all, in
love and joy incarnate, whose only influence was example. Poverty of
body in itself mattered nothing; what Francis wanted was poverty of
pride, and the external robe or the bare feet were outward and necesV
sary forms of protection against its outward display. Against riches
or against all external and visible vanity, rules and laws could be easily
enforced if it were worth while, although the purest humility would be
reached only by those who were indiflferent and unconscious of their
external dress; but against spiritual pride the soul is defenceless, and
of all its forms the subtlest and the meanest is gride of intellect. If
"nostra domina paupertas" had a mortal enemy, it was not the pride
beneath a scarlet robe, but that in a schoolmaster's ferule, and of all
schoolmasters the vainest and most pretentious was the scholastic
philosopher. Satan was logic. Lord Bacon held much the same opinion.
"I reject the syllogism," was the starting-point of his teaching as it
was the essence of Saint Francis's, and the reasons of both men were
the same though their action was opposite. "Let men please them-
selves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human mind,
this is certain: — that, as an uneven mirror distorts the rays of ob-
jects according to its own figure and section, so the mind . . . cannot
be trusted. . . ." Bacon's first object was the same as that of Francis,
to humiliate and if possible destroy the pride of human reason ; both
of them knew that this was their most difficult task, and Francis, who
was charity incarnate, lost his self-control whenever he spoke of the
schools, and became almost bitter, as though in constant terror of a

336

MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

poison or a cancer. " Praeodorabat etiam tempora non longe ventura
in quibus jam praesciebat scientiam inflativam debere esse occasionem
ruinae." He foresaw the time not far off when puffed-up science would
be the ruin of his "domina paupertas." His struggle with this form of
human pride was desperate and tragical in its instant failure. He could
not make even his novices understand what he meant. The most im-
possible task of the mind is to reject in practice the reflex action of it-
self, as Bacon pointed out, and only the highest training has sometimes
partially succeeded in doing it. The schools — ancient, mediaeval, or
modern — have almost equally failed, but even the simple rustics
who tried to follow Francis could not see why the rule of poverty
should extend to the use of a psalter. Over and oyer again he explained
vehemently and dramatically as only an Italian or a Spaniard could,
and still they failed to catch a notion of what he meant.

Quum ergo venisset beatus Franciscus ad
locum ubi erat ille novitius, dixit ille novitius:
"Pater, mihi esset magna consolatio habere
psalterium, sed licet generalis illud mihi con-
cesserit, tamen vellem ipsum habere, pater, de
conscientia tua." Cui beatus Franciscus re-
spondit: "Carolus imperator, Rolandus et
Oliverus et omnes palatini et robusti viri qui
potentes fuerunt in pralio, prosequendo infi-
deles cum multa sudore et labore usque ad
mortem, habuerimt de illis victoriam memoria-
liter, et ad ultimum ipsi sancti martyres sunt
mortui pro fide Christi in certaraine. Nunc
autem multi sunt qui sola narratione eorum
quae illi fecerunt volunt recipere honorem et
humanam laudem. Ita et inter nos sunt multi
qui solum recitando et praedicando opera quae
sancti fecerunt volunt recipere honorem et
laudem; . . . postquam habueris psalterium,
concupisces et volueris habere breviarium; et
postquam habueris breviarium, sedebis in
cathedra tanquam magnus prelatus et dices
fratri tuo: — Apporta mihi breviarium!"

Hiec autem dicens beatus Franciscus cum
magno fervore spiritus accepit de cinere et
posuit super caput suum, et ducendo manum

So when Saint Francis happened to come to
the place where the novice was, the novice
said: "Father, it would be a great comfort to
me to have a psalter, but though my general
should grant it, still I would rather have it, fa-
ther, with your knowledge too." Saint Francis
answered: "The Emperor Charlemagne, Ro-
land and Oliver, and all the palatines and
strong men who were potent in battle, pursuing
the infidels with much toil and sweat even to
death, triumphed over them memorably [with-
out writing it?], and at last these holy martyrs
died in the contest for the faith of Christ. But
now there are many who, merely by telling of
what those men did, want to receive honour ■
and human praise. So, too, among us are many
who, merely by reciting and preaching the
works which the saints have done, want to re-
ceive honour and praise; . . . After you have
got the psalter, you wOl covet and want a
breviary; and after getting the breviary, you
will sit on your throne like a bishop, and will
say to your brother: 'Bring me the breviary!'"

While saying this. Saint Francis with great
vehemence took up a handful of ashes and
spread it over his head; and moving his band

THE MYSTICS 337

super caput suum in circuitu sicut ille qui la vat about his head in a circle as though washing it,
caput, dicebat: "Ego breviarium! ego breviar- said: "I, breviary! I, breviary!" and so kept
ium!" et sic reiteravit tnultoties ducendo on, repeatedly moving his hand about his head;
manum per caput. Et stupefactus et verecun- and stupefied and ashamed was that novice,
datus est frater ille. . . . Elapsis autem pluribus . . . But several months afterwards when Saint
mensibus quum esset beatus Franciscus apud Francis happened to be near Sta Maria de
locum sanctx Mariae de Portiuncula, juxta eel- Portiuncula, by the cell behind the house on
lam post domum in via, praedictus frater iterum the road, the same brother again spoke to him
locutus est ei de psalterio. Cui beatus Francis- about the psalter. Saint Francis replied: "Go
cus dixit : " Vade et facias de hoc sicut dicet tibi and do about it as your director says." On this
minister tuus!" Quo audito, frater ille coepit the brother turned back, but Saint Francis,
redire per viam unde venerat. Beatus autem standing in the road, began to reflect on what
Franciscus remanens in via coepit considerare he had said, and suddenly called after him:
illud quod di.xerat Oli fratri, et statim clamavit "Wait for me, brother! wait!" and going after
post eum, dicens: "Expecta me, frater! ex- him, said: "Return with me, brother, and show
pecta!" Et ivit usque ad eum et ait illi: "Re- me the place where I told you to do as your
vertere mecum, frater, et ostende mihi locum director should say, about the psalter." When
ubi dixi tibi quod faceres de psalterio sicut they had come back to it, Saint Francis bent
diceret minister tuus." Quum ergo pervenis- before the brother, and said: "Mea culpa, bro-
sent ad locum, beatus Franciscus genuflexit ther, mea culpa! because whoever wishes to be
coram fratre illo, et dixit: "Mea culpa, frater! a Minorite must have nothing but a tunic, as
mea culpa! quia quicunque vult esse frater the rule permits, and the cord, and the loin-
Minor non debet habere nisi tunicam, sicut reg- cloth, and what covering is manifestly neces-
ula sibi concedit, et cordam et femoralia et qui sary for the limbs."
manifesta necessitate coguntur calciamenta."

So vivid a picture of an actual mediaeval saint stands out upon this
simple background as is hardly to be found elsewhere in all the records
of centuries, but if the brother himself did not understand it and was
so shamed and stupefied by Francis's vehemence, the world could
understand it no better; the Order itself was ashamed of Saint Francis
because they understood him too well. They hastened to suppress
this teaching against science, although it was the life of Francis's doc-
trine. He taught that the science of the schools led to perdition because
it was puffed up with emptiness and pride. Humility, simplicity, pov-
erty were alone true science. They alone led to heaven. Before the
tribunal of Christ, the schoolmen would be condemned, "and, with
their dark logic (opinionibus tenebrosis) shall be plunged into outer
darkness with the spirits of the darkness." They were devilish, and
would perish with the devils.

338 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

One sees instantly that neither Francis of Assisi nor Bacon of Veru-
lam could have hoped for peace with the schools; twelfth-century
ecstasy felt the futility of mere rhetoric quite as keenly as seventeenth-
century scepticism was to feel it; and yet when Francis died in 1226
at Assisi, Thomas was just being born at Aquino some two hundred
kilometres to the southward. True scholasticism had not begun. Four
hundred years seem long for the human mind to stand still — or go
backward ; the more because the human mind was never better satis-
fied with itself than when thus absorbed in its mirror; but with that
chapter we have nothing to do. The pleasantest way to treat it was that
of Saint Francis; half-serious, half-jesting; as though, after all, in the
thought of infinity, four hundred years were at most only a serio-
comic interlude. At Assisi, once, when a theologian attacked Fra
Egidio by the usual formal arraignment in syllogisms, the brother
waited until the conclusions were laid down, and then, taking out a
flute from the folds of his robe, he played his answer in rustic melodies.
The soul of Saint Francis was a rustic melody and the simplest that
ever reached so high an expression. Compared with it, Theocritus
and Virgil are as modern as Tennyson and ourselves.

All this shows only what Saint Francis was not; to understand what
he was and how he goes with Saint Bernard and Saint Victor through
the religious idyll of Transition architecture, one must wander about
Assisi with the " Floretum " or " Fioretti " in one's hand; — the legends
which are the gospel of Francis as the evangels are the gospel of Christ,
who was reincarnated in Assisi. We have given a deal of time to show-
ing our own sceptical natures how simple the architects and decora-
tors of Chartres were in their notions of the Virgin and her wants;
but French simple-mindedness was already complex compared with
Italian. The Virgin was human; Francis was elementary nature itself,
like sun and air; he was Greek in his joy of life: —

. . . Recessit inde et venit inter Cannarium ... He departed thence and came between
et Mevanium. £t respexit quasdam arbores Cannara and Bevagna; and near the road bt

THE MYSTICS 339

juxta viam in quibus resldebat tanta multi- saw some trees on which perched so great a

tudo avium diversartmi quod nunquam in number of birds as never in those parts had

partibus illis visa similis multitudo. In campo been seen the like. Also in the field beyond,

insuper juxta prsedictas arbores etiam multi- near these same trees, a very great multitude

tudo maxima residebat. Quam multitudinem rested on the ground. This multitude, Saint

sanctus Franciscus respiciens et admirans, Francis seeing with wonder, the spirit of God

facto super eum Spiritu Dei, dixit sociis: " Vo- descending on him he said to his companions:

bis hie me in via exspectantibus, ibo et prse- "Wait for me on the road, while I go and

dicabo sororibus nostris aviculis." Et intravit preach to our sisters the little birds." And he

in campum ad aves quae residebant in terra, went into the field where the birds were on

Et statim quum pradicare incepit onmes aves the ground. And as soon as he began to preach,

in arboribus residentes descenderunt ad eum all the birds in the trees came down to him and

et simul cum aUis de campo immobiles perman- with those in the field stood quite still, even

senmt, quum tamen ipse inter eas iret plurimas when he went among them touching many

timica contingendo. Et nulla earum penitus with his robe. Not one of them moved,

movebatur, sicut recitavit frater Jacobus de as Brother James of Massa related, a saintly

Massa, sanctus homo, qui omnia supradicta man who had the whole story from the mouth

habuit ab ore fratris Massei, qui fuit unus de of Brother Masseo who was one of those then

lis qui tunc erant socii sancti patris. with the sainted father.

Quibus avibus sanctus Franciscus ait: To these birds, Saint Francis said: "Much

"Multum tenemini Deo, sorores meje aves, are you bound to God, birds, my sisters, and

et debetis eum semper et ubique laudare prop- everywhere and always must you praise him for

ter liberum quem ubique habetis volatum, the free flight you everyvihere have; for the

propter vestitum duplicatum et triplicatum, double and triple covering; for the painted and

propter habitum pictum et omatum, propter decorated robe; for the food prepared without

victum sine vestro labore paratum, propter your labour; for the song taught you by the

cantum a Creatore vobis intimatum, propter Creator; for your number multiplied by God's

numerum ex Dei benedictione multiplicatum, blessing; for your seed preserved by God in

propter semen vestrum a Deo in area reserva- the ark; for the element of air allotted to you.

turn, propter elementum aeris vobis deputa- You neither sow nor reap, and God feeds

tum. Vos non seminatis neque metitis, et Deus you; and has given you rivers and springs

vos pascit; et dedit vobis flumina et fontes ad to drink at, mountains and hills, rocks and

potandum, montes et colles, saxa et ibices ad wild goats for refuge, and high trees for nesting;

refugium, et arbores altas ad nidificandum; and though you know neither how to spin nor

et quum nee filare nee texere sciatis, pra;bet to weave, He gives both you and your children

tam vobis quam vestris filiis necessarium in- all the garments you need. Whence much must

dumentum. Unde multum diligit vos Creator the Creator love you, WTio confers so many

qui tot beneficia contuht. Quapropter cavete, blessings. Therefore take care, my small bird

sorores meae aviculae, ni sitis ingratJe sed sisters,never to be ungrateful, but always strive

semper laudare Deum studete." to praise God."

Fra Ugolino, or whoever wrote from the dictation of Brother James
of Massa, after the tradition of Brother Masseo of Marignano reported
Saint Francis's sermon in absolute good faith as Saint Francis probably

340 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

made it and as the birds possibly received it. All were God's creatures,
brothers and sisters, and God alone knew or knows whether or how fai
they understand each other; but Saint Francis, in any case, understood
them and believed that they were in sympathy with him. As far as
the birds or wolves were concerned, it was no great matter, but Francis
did not stop with vertebrates or even with organic forms. "Nor was
it surprising," said the "Speculum," "if fire and other creatures some-
times revered and obeyed him; for, as we who were with him very fre-
quently saw, he held them in such affection and so much delighted in
them, and his soul was moved by such pity and compassion for them,
that he would not see them roughly handled, and talked with them
with such evident delight as if they were rational beings": —

Nam quadam vice, quum sederet juxta For once when he was sitting by the fire, a
ignem, ipso nesciente, ignis invasit pannos ejus spark, without his knowing it, caught his linen
de lino, sive brachas, juxta genu, quumque drawers and set them burning near the knee,
sentiret calorem ejas nolebat ipsum extin- and when he felt the heat he would not extin-
guere. Socius autem ejus videns comburi guish it; but his companion, seeing his clothes
pannos ejus cucurrit ad eum volens extinguere on fire, ran to put it out, and he forbade it,
ignem; ipse vero prohibuit ei, dicens: "Noli, saying: "Don't, my dearest brother, don't hurt
frater, carissime, noli male facere igni!" Et sic the fire!" So he utterly refused to let him put
nullo modo voluit quod extingueret ipsum. lUe it out, and the brother hurried off to get his
vero festinanter ivit ad fratrem qui erat guardian, and brought him to Saint Francis,
guardianus ipsius, et duxit eum ad beatum and together they put out the fire at once
Franciscum, et statim contra voluntatem against Saint Francis's will. So, no matter
beati Francisci, extinxit ignem. Unde quacun- what the necessity, he would never put out fire
que necessitate urgente nunquam voluit ex- or a lamp or candle, so strong was his feeling
tinguere ignem vel lampadem vel candelam, forit;hewouldnoteven let abrotherthrow fire
tantum pietate movebatur ad ipsum. Nolebat or a smoking log from place to place, as is
etiam quod frater projiceret ignem vel lignum usual, but wanted it placed gently (piano) on
fumigantem de loco ad locum sicut solet fieri, the ground, out of respect for Him Whose crea-
sed volebat ut plane poneret ipsum in terra ture it is.
ob reverentiani illius cujus est creatura.

The modern tourist, having with difficulty satisfied himself that
Saint F^-ancis acted thus in good faith, immediately exclaims that he
was a heretic and should have been burned ; but, in truth, the immense
popukr charm of Saint Francis, as of the Virgin, was precisely his
heresies. Both were illogical and heretical by essence; — in strict

THE MYSTICS 341

discipline, in the days of the Holy Office, a hundred years later, both
would have been burned by the Church, as Jeanne d'Arc was, with
infinitely less reason, in 1431. The charm of the twelfth-century Church
was that it knew how to be illogical — no great moral authority ever
knew it better — when God Himself became illogical. It cared no more
than Saint Francis, or Lord Bacon, for the syllogism. Nothing in
twelfth-century art is so fine as the air and gesture of sympathetic
majesty with which the Church drew aside to let the Virgin and Saint
Francis pass and take the lead — for a time. Both were human ideals
too intensely realized to be resisted merely because they were illogical.
The Church bowed and was silent.

This does not concern us. What the Church thought or thinks is
its own affair, and what it chooses to call orthodox is orthodox. We
have been trying only to understand what the Virgin and Saint Francis
thought, which is matter of fact, not of faith. Saint Francis was
even more outspoken than the Virgin. She calmly set herself above
dogma, and, with feminine indifference to authority, overruled it.
He, having asserted in the strongest terms the principle of obedience,
paid no further attention to dogma, but, without the least reticence,
insisted on practices and ideas that no Church could possibly permit
or avow. Toward the end of his life, his physician cauterized his face
for some neuralgic pain : —

Et posito ferro in igne pro coctura fienda, When the iron was put on the fire for mak-

beatus Franciscus volens confortare spiritum ing the cautery, Saint Francis, wishing to eU'

suum ne pavesceret, sic locutus est ad ignem: courage himself against fear, spoke thus to the

"Frater mi, ignis, nobilis et utiiis inter alias fire: "My brother, fire, noblest and usefullest

creaturas, esto mihi curialis in hac hora quia of creatures, be gentle to me now, because I

dim te dilexi et diligam amore illius qui creavit have loved and will love you with the love of

te. Deprecor etiam creatorem nostrum qui nos Him who created you. Our Creator, too. Who

creavit ut ita tuum calorem temperet ut ipsum created us both, I implore so to temper your

sustinere valeam." Et oratione finita signavit heat that I may have strength to bear it."

ignem signo crucis. And having spoken, he signed the fire with the

cross.

With him, this was not merely a symbol. Children and saints can
believe two contrary things at the same time, but Saint Francis had

342 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

also a complete faith of his own which satisfied him wholly. All nature
was God's creature. The sun and fire, air and water, were neither more
nor less brothers and sisters than sparrows, wolves, and bandits. Even
"daemones sunt castalli Domini nostri"; the devils are wardens of our
Lord. If Saint Francis made any exception from his univeral law of
brotherhood it was that of the schoolmen, but it was never expressed.
Even in his passionate outbreak, in the presence of Saint Dominic, at
the great Chapter of his Order at Sancta Maria de Portiuncula in 1218,
he did not go quite to the length of denying the brotherhood of school-
men, although he placed them far below the devils, and yet every word
of this address seems to sob with the anguish of his despair at the power
of the school anti-Christ: —

Quum beatus Franciscus esset in capitulo When Saint Francis was at the General

generali apud Sanctam Mariam de Portiuncula Chapter held at Sancta Maria de Portiuncula

. . . et fuerunt ibi quir.que millia fratres, quam- . . . and five thousand brothers were present,

plures fratres sapientes et scientiati iverunt ad a number of them who were schoolmen went

dominum Ostiensem qui erat ibidem, et dixer- to Cardinal Hugolino who was there, and said

unt ei: "Domine, volumus ut suadetis fratri to him: "My lord, we want you to persuade

Francisco quod sequatur consilium fratrum Brother Francis to follow the council of the

sapientium et permittat se interdum duci ab learned brothers, and sometimes let himself

eis." Et allegabant regulam sancti Benedicti, be guided by them." And they suggested the

Augustini et Bernardi qui docent sic et sic rule of Saint Benedict or Augustine or Bernard

vivere ordinate. Quae omnia quum retulisset who require their congregations to live so and

cardinalis beato Francisco per modum admoni- so, by regulation. When the Cardinal had re-

tionis, beatus Franciscus, nihil sibi respondens, peated all this to Saint Francis by way of coun-

cepit ipsum per manum et duxit eum ad fratres sel. Saint Francis, making no answer, took him

congregates in capitulo, et sic locutus est by the hand and led him to the brothers assem-

fratribus in fervore et virtute Spiritus sancti: — bled in Chapter, and in the fervour and virtue

of the Holy Ghost, spoke thus to the brothers:

"Fratres mei, fratres mei, Dominus vocavit "My brothers, my brothers, God has called

me per viam simplicitatis et humilitatis, et hanc me by the way of simplicity and humility, and

viam ostendit mihi in veritate pro me et pro has shown me in verity this path for me

illis qui volunt mihi credere et imitari. Et ideo and those who want to believe and follow me;

volo quod non nominetis mihi aliquam regulam so I want you to talk of no Rule to me, neither

neque sancti Benedicti neque sancti Augustini Saint Benedict nor Saint Augustine nor Saint

neque sancti Bernardi, neque aliquam viam Bernard, nor any way or form of Life whatever

et formam vivendi praiter illam quae mihi a except that which God has mercifully pointed

Domino est ostensa misericorditer et donata. out and granted to me. And God said that he

Et dixit mihi Dominus quod volebat me esse wanted me to be a pauper [poverello] and an

unum pauperem et stultum idiotam [magnum idiot — a great f«ol — in this world, and would

THE MYSTICS 343

fatuum] in hoc mundo et noluit nos ducere not lead us by any other path of science than
per viam alkim quam per istam scientiam. Sed this. But by your science and syllogisms God
per vestram scientiam et sapientiam Deus vos will confound you, and I trust in God's warders,
confundet et ego confido in castallis Domini the devils, that through them God shall punish
[idest daemonibus] quod per ipsos puniet vos you, and you will yet come back to your proper
Deus et adhuc redibitis ad vestrum statum station with shame, whether you will or no."
cum vituperio vestro velitis nolitis."

The narration continues: "Tunc cardinalis obstupuit valde et nihil
respondit. Et omnes fratres plurimum timuerunt."

One feels that the reporter has not exaggerated a word; on the
contrary, he softened the scandal, because in his time the Cardinal had
gained his point, and Francis was dead. One can hear Francis begin-
ning with some restraint, and gradually carried away by passion till he
lost control of himself and his language: '"God told me, with his own
words, that he meant me to be a beggar and a great fool, and would
not have us on any other terms; and as for your science, I trust in
God's devils who will beat you out of it, as you deserve.' And the
Cardinal was utterly dumbfoimded and answered nothing; and all the
brothers were scared to death." The Cardinal Hugolino was a great
schoolman, and Dominic was then founding the famous order in which
the greatest of all doctors, Albertus Magnus, was about to begin his
studies. One can imagine that the Cardinal "obstupuit valde," and
that Dominic felt shaken in his scheme of school instruction. For a
single instant, in the flash of Francis's passion, the whole mass of
five thousand monks in a state of semi-ecstasy recoiled before the
impassable gulf that opened between them and the Church.

No one was to blame — no one ever is to blame — because God
wanted contradictory things, and man tried to carry out, as he saw
them, God's trusts. The schoolmen saw their duty in one direction;
Francis saw his in another; and, apparently, when both lines had been
carried, after such fashion as might be, to their utmost results, and five
hundred years had been devoted to the effort, society declared both
to be failures. Perhaps both may some day be revived, for the two

344 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

paths seem to be the only roads that can exist, if man starts by taking
for granted that there is an object to be reached at the end of his jour-
ney. The Church, embracing all mankind, had no choice but to march
with caution, seeking God by every possible means of intellect and
study. Francis, acting only for himself, could throw caution aside and /
trust implicitly in God, like the children who went on crusade. The
two poles of social and political philosophy seem necessarily to be or-
ganization or anarchy; man's intellect or the forces of nature. Francis
saw God in nature, if he did not see nature in God ; as the builders of
Chartres saw the Virgin in their apse. Francis held the simplest and
most childlike form of pantheism. He carried to its last point the
mystical union with God, and its necessary consequence of contempt
and hatred for human intellectual processes. Even Saint Bernard
would have thought his ideas wanting in that "mesure" which the
French mind so much prizes. At the same time we had best try, as
innocently as may be, to realize that no final judgment has yet been
pronounced, either by the Church or by society or by science, on either
or any of these points; and until mankind finally settles to a certainty
where it means to go, or whether it means to go anywhere, — what its
object is, or whether it has an object, — Saint Francis may still prove
to have been its ultimate expression. In that case, his famous chant
— the " Cantico del Sole " — will be the last word of religion, as it was
probably its first. Here it is — too sincere for translation : —

CANTICO DEL SOLE

. . . Laudato sie, misignore, con tucte le tue creature

spetialmente messor lo frate sole

lo quale iorno ct allumini noi per loi

et ellu e bellu e radiante cum grande splendore
de te, altissimo, porta significatione.

Laudato si, misignore, per sora luna e le stelle
in celu lai formate clarite et pretiose et belle.

Laudato si, misignore, per frate vento
et per aere et nubilo et sercno et onne tempo
per lo quale a le tue creature dai sustentamenta

THE MYSTICS 345

Laudato si, misignore, per sor aqua
la quale e multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta.

Laudato si, misignore, per frate focu
per lo quale enallumini la nocte
ed ello e bello et jocondo et robustoso et forte.

Laudato si, misignore, per sora nostra matre terra
la quale ne sustenta et governa
et produce diversi fructi con coloriti flori et herba.

Laudato si, misignore, per sora nostra morte corporale
de la quale nullu homo vivente po skappare
guai acquelli ke morrano ne le peccata mortali. . . .

The verses, if verses they are, have little or nothing in common
with the art of Saint Bernard or Adam of Saint- Victor. Whatever art
they have, granting that they have any, seems to go back to the cave-
Jwellers and the age of stone. Compared with the naivete of the " Can-
tico del Sole," the "Chanson de Roland" or the "Iliad" is a triumph
of perfect technique. The value is not in the verse. The " Chant of the
Sun " is another "Pons Seclorum " — or perhaps rather a " Pons Sanc-
torum " — over which only children and saints can pass. It is almost
a paraphrase of the sermon to the birds. "Thank you, mi signore,
for messor brother sun, in especial, who is your symbol; and for sis-
ter moon and the stars; and for brother wind and air and sky; and
for sister water; and for brother fire; and for mother earth! We are all
yours, mi signore! We are your children; your household; your feudal
family! but we never heard of a Church. We are all varying forms of
the same ultimate energy; shifting symbols of the same absolute unity;
but our only unity, beneath you, is nature, not law! We thank you for
no human institutions, even for those established in your name; but,
with all our hearts we thank you for sister our mother Earth and its
fruits and coloured flowers!"

Francis loved them all — the brothers and sisters — as intensely as
a child loves the taste and smell of a peach, and as simply; but behind
tiiem remained one sister whom no one loved, and for whom, in his

346 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

first verses, Francis had rendered no thanks. Only on his death-bed he
added the lines of gratitude for "our sister death," the long-sought,
never-found sister of the schoolmen, who solved all philosophy and
merged multiplicity in unity. The solution was at least simple; one
must decide for one's self, according to one's personal standards,
whether or not it is more sympathetic than that with which we have
got lastly to grapple in the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

CHAPTER XVI

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

LONG before Saint Francis's death, in 1226, the French mj^stics
had exhausted their energies and the siecle had taken new heart.
Society could not remain forever balancing between thought and act.
A few gifted natures could absorb themselves in the absolute, but the
rest lived for the day, and needed shelter and safety. So the Church
bent again to its task, and bade the Spaniard Dominic arm new
levies with the best weapons of science, and flaunt the name of Aris-
totle on the Church banners along with that of Saint Augustine. The
year 12 15, which happened to be the date of Magna Charta and other
easily fixed events, like the birth of Saint Louis, may serve to mark the
triumph of the schools. The pointed arch revelled at Rheims and the
Gothic architects reached perfection at Amiens just as Francis died
at Assisi and Thomas was born at Aquino. The Franciscan Order it-
self was swept with the stream that Francis tried to dam, and the great
Franciscan schoolman, Alexander Hales, in 1222, four years before the
death of Francis, joined the order and began lecturing as though
Francis himself had lived only to teach scholastic philosophy.

The rival Dominican champion, Albertus Magnus, began his career
a little later, in 1228. Born of the noble Swabian family of Bollstadt,
in 1 193, he drifted, like other schoolmen, to Paris, and the Rue Maitre
Albert, opposite Notre Dame, still records his fame as a teacher there.
Thence he passed to a school established by the order at Cologne,
where he was lecturing with great authority in 1243 when the general
superior of the order brought up from Italy a young man of the highest
promise to be trained as his assistant.

Thomas, the new pupil, was born under the shadow of Monte

348 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Cassino in 1226 or 1227. His father, the Count of Aquino, claimed
descent from the imperial line of Swabia; his mother, from the Norman
princes of Sicily; so that in him the two most energetic strains in Eu-
rope met. His social rank was royal, and the order set the highest value
on it. He took the vows in 1243, and went north at once to help AI-
bertus at Cologne. In 1245, the order sent Albertus back to Paris, and
Thomas with him. There he remained till 1248 when he was ordered
to Cologne as assistant lecturer, and only four years afterwards, at
twenty-five years old, he was made full professor at Paris. His indus-
try and activity never rested till his death in 1274, not yet fifty years
old, when he bequeathed to the Church a mass of manuscKpt that
tourists will never know enough to estimate except by weight. His
complete works, repeatedly printed, fill between twenty and thirty
quarto volumes. For so famous a doctor, this is almost meagre. Unfor-
tunately his greatest work, the "Summa Theologise," is unfinished
— like Beauvais Cathedral.

Perhaps Thomas's success was partly due to his memory which is
said to have been phenomenal; for, in an age when cyclopaedias were
unknown, a cyclopaedic memory must have counted for half the battle
in these scholastic disputes where authority could be met only by
authority; but in this case, memory was supported by mind. Out-
wardly Thomas was heavy and slow in manner, if it is true that his
companions called him "the big dumb ox of Sicily" ; and in fashionable
or court circles he did not enjoy reputation for acute sense of humour.
Saint Louis's household offers a picture not wholly clerical, least of
all among the King's brothers and sons; and perhaps the dinner-table
was not much more used then than now to abrupt interjections of
theology into the talk about hunting and hounds; but however it hap-
pened, Thomas one day surprised the company by solemnly announc-
ing— "I have a decisive argument against the Manicheans!" No
wit or humour could be more to the point — between two saints that
were to be — than a decisive argument against enemies of Christ, and

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 349

one greatly regrets that the rest of the conversation was not reported,
unless, indeed, it is somewhere in the twenty-eight quarto volumes;
but it probably lacked humour for courtiers.

The twenty-eight quarto volumes must be closed books for us.
None but Dominicans have a right to interpret them. No Franciscan
— or even Jesuit — understands Saint Thomas exactly or explains him
with authority. For summer tourists to handle these intricate problems
in a theological spirit would be altogether absurd; but, for us, these
great theologians were also architects who undertook to build a Church
Intellectual, corresponding bit by bit to the Church Administrative,
both expressing — and expressed by — the Church Architectural.
Alexander Hales, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus,
and the rest, were artists; and if Saint Thomas happens to stand at
their head as type, it is not because we choose him or understand him
better than his rivals, but because his order chose him rather than his
master -Albert, to impose as authority on the Church; and because
Pope John XXII canonized him on the ground that his decisions were
miracles; and because the Council of Trent placed his "Summa"
among the sacred books on their table; and because Innocent VI said
that his doctrine alone was sure; and finally, because Leo XIII very
lately made a point of declaring that, on the wings of Saint Thomas's
genius, human reason has reached the most sublime height it can
probably ever attain.

Although the Franciscans, and, later, the Jesuits, have not always
shown as much admiration as the Dominicans for the genius of Saint
Thomas, and the mystics have never shown any admiration whatever
for the philosophy of the schools, the authority of Leo XIII is final,
at least on one point and the only one that concerns us. Saint Thomas
is still alive and overshadows as many schools as he ever did; at all
events, as many as the Church maintains. He has outlived Descartes
and Leibnitz and a dozen other schools of philosophy more or less
serious in their day. He has mostly outlived Hume, Voltaire, and the

350 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

militant sceptics. His method is typical and classic; his sentences,
when interpreted by the Church, seem, even to an untrained mind,
intelligible and consistent; his Church Intellectual remains practically
unchanged, and, like the Cathedral of Beauvais, erect, although the
storms of six or seven centuries have prostrated, over and over again,
every other social or political or juristic shelter. Compared with it,
all modern systems are complex and chaotic, crowded with self-con-
tradictions, anomalies, impracticable functions and outworn inheri-
tances; but beyond all their practical shortcomings is their frag-
mentary character. An economic civilization troubles itself about
the universe much as a hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean,
only as a region to be avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered
God and man, mind and matter, the universe and the atom, the one
and the multiple, within the walls of an harmonious home.

Theologians, like architects, were supposed to receive their Church
complete in all its lines; they were modern judges who interpreted the
law, but never invented it. Saint Thomas merely selected between
disputed opinions, but he allowed himself to wander very far afield,
indeed, in search of opinions to dispute. The field embraced all that
existed, or might have existed, or could never exist. The immense
structure rested on Aristotle and Saint Augustine at the last, but as a
work of art it stood alone, like Rheims or Amiens Cathedral, as though
it had no antecedents. Then, although, like Rheims, its style was never
meant to suit modern housekeeping and is ill-seen by the Ecole des
Beaux Arts, it reveals itself in its great mass and intelligence as a work
of extraordinary genius; a system as admirably proportioned as any
cathedral and as complete; a success not universal either in art or
science.

Saint Thomas's architecture, like any other work of art, is best
studied by itself as though he created it outright; otherwise a tourist
would never get beyond its threshold. Beginning with the foundation
which is God and God's active presence in His Church, Thomas next

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 35i

built God into the walls and towers of His Church, in the Trinity and
its creation of mind and matter in time and space; then finally he
filled the Church by uniting mind and matter in man, or man's soul,
giving to humanity a free will that rose, like the fl^che, to heaven.
The foundation — the structure — the congregation — are enough
for students of art; his ideas of law, ethics, and politics; his vocabulary,
his syllogisms, his arrangement are, like the drawings of Villard de
Honnecourt's sketch-book, curious but not vital. After the eleventh-
century Romanesque Church of Saint Michael came the twelfth-cen-
tury Transition Church of the Virgin, and all merged and ended at
last in the thirteenth-century Gothic Cathedral of the Trinity. One
wants to see the end.

The foundation of the Christian Church should be — as the simple
deist might suppose — always the same, but Saint Thomas knew
better. His foundation was Norman, not French; it spoke the prac-
tical architect who knew the mathematics of his art, and who saw that
the foundation laid by Saint Bernard, Saint Victor, Saint Francis, the
whole mystical, semi-mystical, Cartesian, Spinozan foundation, past
or future, could not bear the weight of the structure to be put on it.
Thomas began by sweeping the ground clear of them. God must be a
concrete thing, not a human thought. God must be proved by the
senses like any other concrete thing; "nihil est in intellectu quin prius
fuerit in sensu"; even if Aristotle had not affirmed the law, Thomas
would have discovered it. He admitted at once that God could not be i^
taken for granted.

The admission, as every boy-student of the Latin Quarter knew,
was exceedingly bold and dangerous. The greatest logicians commonly
shrank from proving unity by multiplicity. Thomas was one of the
greatest logicians that ever lived ; the question had always been at the
bottom of theolog>'; he deliberately challenged what every one knew
to be an extreme peril. If his foundation failed, his Church fell. Many
critics have thought that he saw dangers four hundred years ahead.

352 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

The time came, about 1 650-1 700, when Descartes, deserting Saint
Thomas, started afresh with the idea of God as a concept, and at once
found himself charged with a deity that contained the universe; nor
did the Cartesians — until Spinoza made it clear — seem able or will-
ing to see that the Church could not accept this deity because the
Church required a God who caused the universe. The two deities
destroyed each other. One was passive; the other active. Thomas
warned Descartes of a logical quicksand which must necessarily swal-
low up any Church, and which Spinoza explored to the bottom.
Thomas said truly that every true cause must be proved as a cause, not
merely as a sequence ; otherwise they must end in a universal energy or
substance without causality — a source.

Whatever God might be to others, to His Church he could not be a
sequence or a source. That point had been admitted by William of
Champeaux, and made the division between Christians and infidels.
On the other hand, if God must be proved as a true cause in order to
warrant the Church or the State in requiring men to worship Him as
Creator, the student became the more curious — if a churchman, the
more anxious — to be assured that Thomas succeeded in his proof,
especially since he did not satisfy Descartes and still less Pascal. That
the mystics should be dissatisfied was natural enough, since they were
committed to the contrary view, but that Descartes should desert was
a serious blow which threw the French Church into consternation from
which it never quite recovered.

"I see motion," said Thomas: "I infer a motor!" This reasoning,
which may be fifty thousand years old, is as strong as ever it was ; stronger
than some more modern inferences of science; but the average mechanic
stated it differently. "I see motion," he admitted: "I infer energy.
I see motion everywhere; I infer energy everywhere." Saint Thomas
barred this door to materialism by adding: "I see motion; I cannot
infer an infinite series of motors: I can only infer, somewhere at the
end of the series, an intelligent, fixed motor." The average modern

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 353

mechanic might not dissent but would certainly hesitate. " No doubt ! "
he might say; "we can conduct our works as well on that as on any
other theory, or as we could on no theory at all; but, if you offer it as
proof, we can only say that we have not yet reduced all motion to one
source or all energies to one law, much less to one act of creation,
although we have tried our best." The result of some centuries of
experiment tended to raise rather than silence doubt, although, even
in his own day, Thomas would have been scandalized beyond the re-
sources of his Latin had Saint Bonaventure met him at Saint Louis's
dinner-table and complimented him, in the King's hearing, on having
proved, beyond all Franciscan cavils, that the Church Intellectual
had necessarily but one first cause and creator — himself.

The Church Intellectual, like the Church Architectural, implied not
one architect, but myriads, and not one fixed, intelligent architect at
the end of the series, but a vanishing vista without a beginning at any
definite moment; and if Thomas pressed his argument, the twentieth-
century mechanic who should attend his conferences at the Sorbonne
would be apt to say so. "What is the use of trying to argue me into it?
Your inference may be sound logic, but is not proof. Actually we know
less about it than you did. All we know is the thing we handle, and
we cannot handle your fixed, intelligent prime motor. To your old
ideas of form we have added what we call force, and we are rather
further than ever from reducing the complex to unity. In fact, if you
are aiming to convince me, I will tell you flatly that I know only the
multiple, and have no use for unity at all."

In the thirteenth century men did not depend so much as now on
actual experiment, but the nominalist said in efTect the same thing.
Unity to him was a pure concept, and any one who thought it real
would believe that a triangle was alive and could walk on its legs.
Without proving unity, philosophers saw no way to prove God. They
could only fall back on an attempt to prove that the concept of unity
proved itself, and this phantasm drove the Cartesians to drop Thomas'.s

354 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

argument and assert that "the mere fact of having within us the idea
of a thing more perfect than ourselves, proves the real existence of that
thing." Four hundred years earlier Saint Thomas had replied in ad-
vance that Descartes wanted to prove altogether too much, and
Spinoza showed mathematically that Saint Thomas had been in the
right. The finest religious mind of the time — Pascal — admitted
it and gave up the struggle, like the mystics of Saint -Victor.

Thus some of the greatest priests and professors of the Church,
including Duns Scotus himself, seemed not wholly satisfied that
Thomas's proof was complete, but most of them admitted that it was
the safest among possible foundations, and that it showed, as archi-
tecture, the Norman temper of courage and caution. The Norman
was ready to run great risks, but he would rather grasp too little than
too much; he narrowed the spacing of his piers rather than spread them
too wide for safe vaulting. Between Norman blood and Breton blood
was a singular gap, as Renan and every other Breton has delighted to
point out. Both Abelard and Descartes were Breton. The Breton
seized more than he could hold ; the Norman took less than he would
have liked.

God, then, is proved. What the schools called form, what science
calls energy, and what the intermediate period called the evidence of
design, made the foundation of Saint Thomas's cathedral. God is an
intelligent, fixed prime motor — not a concept, or proved by concepts;
— a concrete fact, proved by the senses of sight and touch. On that
foundation Thomas built. The walls and vaults of his Church were
more complex than the foundation ; especially the towers were trouble-
some. Dogma, the vital purpose of the Church, required support. The
most weighty dogma, the central tower of the Norman cathedral, was
the Trinity, and between the Breton solution which was too heavy,
and the French solution which was too light, the Norman Thomas
found a way. Remembering how vehemently the French Church, under
Saint Bernard, had protected the Trinity from all interference what-

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 355

ever, one turns anxiously to see what Thomas said about it ; and unless
one misunderstands him, — as is very likely, indeed, to be the case,
since no one may even profess to understand the Trinity, — Thomas
treated it as simply as he could. "God, being conscious of Himself,
thinks Himself; his thought is Himself, his own reflection in the Verb
— the so-called Son." "Est in Deo intelligente seipsum Verbum Dei
quasi Deus intellectus." The idea was not new, and as ideas went it
was hardly a mystery; but the next step was naif: — God, as a double
consciousness, loves Himself, and realizes Himself in the Holy Ghost.
The third side of the triangle is love or grace.

Many theologians have found fault with this treatment of the sub-
ject, which seemed open to every objection that had been made to
Abelard, Gilbert de la Poree, or a thousand other logicians. They
commonly asked why Thomas stopped the Deity's self-realizations at
love, or inside the triangle, since these realizations were real, not
symbolic, and the square was at least as real as any other combina-
tion of line. Thomas replied that knowledge and will — the Verb and
the Holy Ghost — were alone essential. The reply did not suit every
one, even among doctors, but since Saint Thomas rested on this
simple assertion, it is no concern of ours to argue the theology. Only
as art, one can afford to say that the form is more architectural than
religious; it would surely have been suspicious to Saint Bernard.
Mystery there was none, and logic little. The concept of the Holy
Ghost was childlike; for a pupil of Aristotle it was inadmissible, since
it led to nothing and helped no step toward the universe.

Admitting, if necessary, the criticism, Thomas need not admit the
blame, if blame there were. Every theologian was obliged to stop the
pursuit of logic by force, before it dragged him into paganism and pan-
theism. Theology begins with the universal, — God, — who must be
a reality, not a symbol; but it is forced to limit the process of God's
realizations somewhere, or the priest soon becomes a worshipper of
God in sticks and stones. Theologists had commonly chosen, from time

356 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

immemorial, to stop at the Trinity; within the triangle they were
wholly realist ; but they could not admit that God went on to realize
Himself in the square and circle, or that the third member of the Trin-
ity contained multiplicity, because the Trinity was a restless weight
on the Church piers, which, like the central tower, constantly tended
to fall, and needed to be lightened. Thomas gave it the lightest form
possible, and there fixed it.

Then came his great tour-de-force, the vaulting of his broad nave;
and, if ignorance is allowed an opinion, even a lost soul may admire
the grand simplicity of Thomas's scheme. He swept away the hori-
zontal lines altogether, leaving them barely as a part of decoration.
The whole weight of his arches fell, as in the latest Gothic, where the
eye sees nothing to break the sheer spring of the nervures, from the
rosette on the keystone a hundred feet above down to the church floor.
In Thomas's creation nothing intervened between God and his world;
secondary causes become ornaments; only two forces, God and man,
stood in the Church.

The chapter of Creation is so serious, and Thomas's creation, like
every other, is open to so much debate, that no student can allow
another to explain it; and certainly no man whatever, either saint or
sceptic, can ever yet have understood Creation aright unless divinely
inspired ; but whatever Thomas's theory was as he meant it, he seems
to be understood as holding that every created individual — animal,
vegetable, or mineral — was a special, divine act. Whatever has form
is created, and whatever is created takes form directly from the will of
God, which is also his act. The intermediate universals — the second-
ary causes — vanish as causes; they are, at most, sequences or relations;
all merge in one universal act of will; instantaneous, infinite, eternal.

Saint Thomas saw God, much as Milton saw him, resplendent in

That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty,
■ Wherewith he wont, at Heaven's high council-table,
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity;

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 357

except that, in Thomas's thought, the council-table was a work-table,
because God did not take counsel ; He was an act. The Trinity was an
infinite possibility of will; nothing within but

The baby image of the giant mass
Of things to come at large.

Neither time nor space, neither matter nor mind, not even force
existed, nor could any intelligence conceive how, even though they
should exist, they could be united in the lowest association. A crj'stal
was as miraculous as Socrates. Only abstract force, or what the school-
men called form, existed undeveloped from eternity, like the abstract
line in mathematics.

Fifty or a hundred years before Saint Thomas settled the Church
dogma, a monk of Citeaux or some other abbey, a certain Alain of
Lille, had written a Latin poem, as abstruse an allegory as the best,
which had the merit of painting the scene of man's creation as far as
concerned the mechanical process much as Thomas seems to have seen
it. M. Haureau has printed an extract (vol. I, p. 352). Alain con-
ceded to the weakness of human thought, that God was working in
time and space, or rather on His throne in heaven, when nature, pro-
posing to create a new and improved man, sent Reason and Prudence
up to ask Him for a soul to fit the new body. Having passed through
various adventures and much scholastic instruction, the messenger
Prudence arrived, after having dropped her dangerous friend Reason
by the way. The request was respectfully presented to God, and
favourably received. God promised the soul, and at once sent His ser-
vant Noys — Thought — to the storehouse of ideas, to choose it : —

Ipse Deus rem prosequitur, producit in actum God Himself pursues the task, and sets in act

Quod pepigit. Vocat ergo Noym quae prae- What He promised. So He calls Noys to seek

paert ilH A copy of His will. Idea of the human mind,

Numinis exemplar, humanre mentis Idaeam, To whose form the spirit should be shaped,

Ad cujus formam formetur spiritus omni Rich in every virtue, which, veiled in garb

Munere virtutum dives, qui, nube caducse Of frail flesh, is to be hidden in a shade of body,

Carnis odumbratus veletur corporis umbra. Then Noys, at the King's order, turning one
Tunc Noys ad regis pra:ceptum singula rerum by one

358 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Vestigans exempla, novam perquirit Idaeam. Each sample, seeks the new Idea.

Inter tot species, speciem vix invenit illam Among so many images she hardly finds that

Quam petit; offertur tandem quaesita petenti. Which she seeks; at last the sought one appears.

Hanc formam Noys ipsa Deo praesentat ut ejus This form Noys herself brings to God for Him

Format ad exemplar animam. Tunc ille To form a soul to its pattern. He takes the

sigillum seal,

Sumit, ad ipsius formx vestigia formam And gives form to the soul after the model

Dans animje, vultum qualem deposcit Idsea Of the form itself, stamping on the sample

Imprimit exemplo; tolas usurpat imago The figure such as the Idea requires. The seal

Exemplaris opes, loquiturque figura sigil- Covers the whole field, and the impression

lum. expresses the stamp.

The translation is probably full of mistakes; indeed, one is permitted
to doubt whether Alain himself accurately understood the process; but
in substance he meant that God contained a storehouse of ideas, and
stamped each creation with one of these forms. The poets used a va-
riety of figures to help out their logic, but that of the potter and his
pot was one of the most common. Omar Khayydm was using it at the
same time with Alain of Lille, but with a difference: for his pot seems
to have been matter alone, and his soul was the wine it received from
God ; while Alain's soul seems to have been the form and not the con-
tents of the pot.

The figure matters little. In any case God's act was the union of
mind with matter by_ the same act or will which created both. No
intermediate cause or condition intervened ; no secondary influence had
anything whatever to do with the result. Time had nothing to do with
it. Every individual that has existed or shall exist was created by the
same instantaneous act, for all time. "When the question regards the
universal agent who produces beings and time, we cannot consider him
as acting now and before, according to the succession of time." God
emanated time, force, matter, mind, as He might emanate gravitation,
not as a part of His substance but as an energy of His will, and main-
tains them in their activity by the same act, not by a new one. Every
individual is a part of the direct act; not a secondary outcome. The
soul has no father or mother. Of all errors one of the most serious is
to suppose that the soul descends by generation. "Having life and

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 359

action of its own, it subsists without the body; ... it must therefore
be produced directly, and since it is not a material substance, it cannot
y/be produced by way of generation; it must necessarily be created by
^God, Consequently to suppose that the intelligence [or intelligent
soul] is the effect of generation is to suppose that it is not a pure and
simple substance, but corruptible like the body. It is therefore heresy
to say that this soul is transmitted by generation." What is true of
the soul should be true of all other form, since no form is a material
substance. The utmost possible relation between any two individuals
is that God may have used the same stamp or mould for a series of
creations, and especially for the less spiritual: "God is the first model
for all things. One may also say that, among His creatures some serve
as types or models for others because there are some which are made
in the image of others"; but generation means sequence, not cause.
The only true cause is God. Creation is His sole act, in which no sec-
ond cause can share. "Creation is more perfect and loftier than gen- ^
eration, because it aims at producing the whole substance of the
being, though it starts from absolute nothing."

Thomas Aquinas, when he pleased, was singularly lucid, and on this
point he was particularly positive. The architect insisted on the con-
trolling idea of his structure. The Church was God, and its lines ex-
cluded interference. God and the Church embraced all the converging
lines of the universe, and the universe showed none but lines that con-
verged. Between God and man, nothing whatever intervened. The
individual was a compound of form, or soul, and matter; but both
were always created together, by the same act, out of nothing. "Sim-
pliciter fatendum est animas simul cum corporibus creari et infundi."
It must be distinctly understood that souls were not created before
bodies, but that they were created at the same time as the bodies they
animate. Nothing whatever preceded this union of two substances
which did not exist: "Creatio est productio alicujus rei secundum
6uam totam substantiam, nullo praesupposito, quod sit vel increatum

360 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

vel ab aliquo creatum." Language can go no further in exclusion ox
every possible preceding, secondary, or subsequent cause, " Productia
universalis entis a Deo non est motus nee mutatio, sed est quaedam
simplex emanatio." The whole universe is, so to speak, a simple
emanation from God.

The famous junction, then, is made! — that celebrated fusion of the
universal with the individual, of unity with multiplicity, of God and
nature, which had broken the neck of every philosophy ever invented;
which had ruined William of Champeaux and was to ruin Descartes;
this evolution of the finite from the infinite was accomplished. The
supreme triumph was as easily effected by Thomas Aquinas as it was
to be again effected, four hundred years later, by Spinoza. He had
merely to assert the fact: "It is so! it cannot be otherwise!" "For
the thousandth and hundred-thousandth time; — what is the use of
discussing this prime motor, this Spinozan substance, any longer? We
know it is there!" that — as Professor Haeckel very justly repeats for
the millionth time — is enough.

One point, however, remained undetermined. The Prime Motor and
His action stood fixed, and no one wished to disturb Him; but this was
not the point that had disturbed William of Champeaux. Abelard's
question still remained to be answered. How did Socrates differ from
Plato — Judas from John — Thomas Aquinas from Professor Haeckel?
Were they, in fact, two, or one? What made an individual? What was
God's centimetre measure? The abstract form or soul which existed as
a possibility in God, from all time, — was it one or many? To the
Church, this issue overshadowed all else, for, if humanity was one and
not multiple, the Church, which dealt only with individuals, was lost.
To the schools, also, the issue was vital, for, if the soul or form was
already multiple from the first, unity was lost; the ultimate substance
and prime motor itself became multiple; the whole issue was reopened.

To the consternation of the Church, and even of his own order,
Thomas, following closely his masters, Albert and Aristotle, asserted

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 361

that the soul was measured by matter. " Division occurs in substances
in ratio of quantity, as Aristotle says in his 'Physics.* And so di-
mensional quantity is a principle of individuation." The soul is a
fluid absorbed by matter in proportion to the absorptiv^e power of the
matter. The soul is an energy existing in matter proportionately to the
dimensional quantity of the matter. The soul is a wine, greater or less
in quantity according to the size of the cup. In our report of the great
debate of 1 1 10, between Champeaux and Abelard, we have seen William
persistently tempting Abelard to fall into this admission that matter
made the man ; — that the universal equilateral triangle became an
individual if it were shaped in metal, the matter giving it reality which
mere form could not give; and Abelard evading the issue as though
his life depended on it. In fact, had Abelard dared to follow Aristotle
into what looked like an admission that Socrates and Plato were iden-
tical as form and differed only in weight, his life might have been the
forfeit. How Saint Thomas escaped is a question closely connected
with the same inquiry about Saint Francis of Assisi. A Church which
embraced, with equal sympathy, and within a hundred years, the Vir-
gin, Saint Bernard, William of Champeaux and the School of Saint-
Victor, Peter the Venerable, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Dominic,
Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Saint Bonaventure, was more liberal than
any modern State can afford to be. Radical contradictions the State
may perhaps tolerate, though hardly, but never embrace or profess.
Such elasticity long ago vanished from human thought.

Yet only Dominicans believe that the Church adopted this law of
individualization, or even assented to it. If M. Jourdain is right,
Thomas was quickly obliged to give it another form: — that, though
all souls belonged to the same species, they differed in their aptitudes
for uniting with particular bodies. "This soul is commensurate with
this body, and not with that other one." The idea is double; for either
the souls individualized themselves, and Thomas abandoned his doc-
trine of their instantaneous creation, with the bodies, out of nothing;

362 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

or God individualized them in the act of creation, and matter had no
thing to do with it. The difficulty is no concern of ours, but the greal
scholars who took upon themselves to explain it made it worse, until
at last one gathers only that Saint Thomas held one of three views:
either the soul of humanity was individualized by God, or it individ-
ualized itself, or it was divided by ratio of quantity, that is, by matter.
This amounts to saying that one knows nothing about it, which we
knew before and may admit with calmness; but Thomas Aquinas was
not so happily placed, between the Church and the schools. Human-
ity had a form common to itself, which made it what it was. By some
means this form was associated with matter; in fact, matter was only
known as associated with form. If, then, God, by an instantaneous
act, created matter and gave it form according to the dimensions of
the matter, innocent ignorance might infer that there was, in the act
of God, one world-soul and one world-matter, which He united in dif-
ferent proportions to make men and things. Such a doctrine was fatal
to the Church. No greater heresy could be charged against the worst
Arab or Jew, and Thomas was so well aware of his danger that he re-
coiled from it with a vehemence not at all in keeping with his supposed
phlegm. With feverish eagerness to get clear of such companions, he
denied and denounced, in all companies, in season and out of season,
the idea that intellect was one and the same for all men, differing only
with the quantity of matter it accompanied. He challenged the ad-
herent of such a doctrine to battle; "let him take the pen if he dares!"
No one dared, seeing that even Jews enjoyed a share of common sense
and had seen some of their friends burn at the stake not very long
before for such opinions, not even openly maintained; while unedu-
cated people, who are perhaps incapable of receiving intellect at all,
but for whose instruction and salvation the great work of Saint
Thomas and his scholars must chiefly exist, cannot do battle because
they cannot understand Thomas's doctrine of matter and form which
to them seems frank pantheism.

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 363

So it appeared to Duns Scotus also, if one may assert in the Doctoi
Subtilis any opinion without qualification. Duns began his career
only about 1300, after Thomas's death, and stands, therefore, beyond
our horizon; but he is still the pride of the Franciscan Order and stands
second in authority to the great Dominican alone. In denying Thomas's
doctrine that matter individualizes mind, Duns laid himself open to
the worse charge of investing matter with a certain embryonic, inde-
pendent, shadowy soul of its own. Scot's system, compared with that
of Thomas, tended toward liberty. Scot held that the excess of power
in Thomas's prime motor neutralized the power of his secondary causes,
so that these appeared altogether superfluous. This is a point that
ought to be left to the Church to decide, but there can be no harm in
quoting, on the other hand, the authority of some of Scot's critics
within the Church, who have thought that his doctrine tended to deify
matter and to keep open the road to Spinoza. Narrow and dangerous
was the border-line always between pantheism and materialism, and
the chief interest of the schools was in finding fault with each other's
paths.

The opinions in themselves need not disturb us, although the ques-
tion is as open to dispute as ever it was and perhaps as much disputed;
but the turn of Thomas's mind is worth study. A century or two
later, his passion to be reasonable, scientific, architectural would
have brought him within range of the Inquisition. Francis of Assisi
was not more archaic and cave-dweller than Thomas of Aquino was
modern and scientific. In his effort to be logical he forced his Deity to
be as logical as himself, which hardly suited Omnipotence. He hewed
the Church dogmas into shape as though they were rough stones. About
no dogma could mankind feel interest more acute than about that of
immortality, which seemed to be the single point vitally necessary for
any Church to prove and define as clearly as light itself. Thomas
trimmed down the soul to half its legitimate claims as an immortal
being by insisting that God created it from nothing in the same act of

364 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

will by which He created the body and united the two in time and
space. The soul existed as form for the body, and had no previous
existence. Logic seemed to require that when the body died and dis-
solved, after the union which had lasted, at most, only an instant or
two of eternity, the soul, which fitted that body and no other, should
dissolve with it. In that case the Church dissolved, too, since it had
no reason for existence except the soul. Thomas met the difficulty
by suggesting that the body's form might take permanence from the
matter to which it gave form. That matter should individualize mind
was itself a violent wrench of logic, but that it should also give per-
manence — the one quality it did not possess — to this individual
mind seemed to many learned doctors a scandal. Perhaps Thomas
meant to leave the responsibility on the Church, where it belonged as
a matter not of logic but of revealed truth. At all events, this treat-
ment of mind and matter brought him into trouble which few modern
logicians would suspect.

The human soul having become a person by contact with matter,
and having gained eternal personality by the momentary union, was
finished, and remains to this day for practical purposes unchanged ; but
the angels and devils, a world of realities then more real than man,
were never united with matter, and therefore could not be persons.
Thomas admitted and insisted that the angels, being immaterial, —
neither clothed in matter, nor stamped on it, nor mixed with it, — were
universals; that is, each was a species in himself, a class, or perhaps
what would be now called an energy, with no other individuality than
he gave himself.

The idea seems to modern science reasonable enough. Science has to
deal, for example, with scores of chemical energies which it knows
little about except that they always seem to be constant to the same
conditions; but every one knows that in the particular relation of
mind to matter the battle is as furious as ever. The soul has always
refused to live in peace with the body. The angels, too, were always

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 365

in rebellion. They insisted on personality, and the devils even more
obstinately than the angels. The dispute was — and is — far frorr
trifling. Mind would rather ignore matter altogether. In the thir-
teenth century mind did, indeed, admit that matter was something,
— which it quite refuses to admit in the twentieth, — but treated it
as a nuisance to be abated. To the pure in spirit one argued in vain
that spirit must compromise; that nature compromised; that God
compromised ; that man himself was nothing but a somewhat clumsy
compromise. No argument served. Mind insisted on absolute des-
potism. Schoolmen as well as mystics would not believe that matter
was what it seemed, — if, indeed, it existed; — unsubstantial, shifty,
shadowy; changing with incredible swiftness into dust, gas, flame;
vanishing in mysterious lines of force into space beyond hope of
recovery; whirled about in eternity and infinity by that mind, form,
energy, or thought which guides and rules and tyrannizes and is the
universe. The Church wanted to be pure spirit; she regarded matter V
with antipathy as something foul, to be held at arms' length lest it
should stain and corrupt the soul; the most she would willingly admit
was that mind and matter might travel side by side, like a double-
headed comet, on parallel lines that never met, with a preestablished
harmony that existed only in the prime motor.

Thomas and his master Albert were almost alone in imposing on
the Church the compromise so necessary for its equilibrium. The
balance of matter against mind was the same necessity in the Church
Intellectual as the balance of thrusts in the arch of the Gothic cathe-
dral. Nowhere did Thomas show his architectural obstinacy quite so
plainly as in thus taking matter under his protection. Nothing would
induce him to compromise with the angels. He insisted on keeping
man wholly apart, as a complex of energies in which matter shared
equally with mind. The Church must rest firmly on both. The angels
differed from other beings below them precisely because they were im-
material and impersonal. Such rigid logic outraged the spiritual Church.

366 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Perhaps Thomas's sudden death in 1274 alone saved him from the
fate of Abelard, but it did not save his doctrine. Two years afterwards,
in 1276, the French and English churches combined to condemn it.
fitienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, presided over the French Synod;
Robert Kilwardeby, of the Dominican Order, Archbishop of Canter-
bury, presided over the Council at Oxford. The synods were composed
of schoolmen as well as churchmen, and seem to have been the result
of a serious struggle for power between the Dominican and Francis-
can Orders. Apparently the Church compromised between them by
condemning the errors of both. Some of these errors, springing from
Alexander Hales and his Franciscan schools, were in effect the foun-
dation of another Church. Some were expressly charged against
Brother Thomas. "Contra fratrem Thomam" the councils forbade
teaching that — "quia intelligentiae non habent materiam, Deus non
potest plures ejusdem speciei facere; et quod materia non est in ange-
lis"; further, the councils struck at the vital centre of Thomas's sys-
tem,— "quod Deus non potest individua multiplicare sub una
specie sine materia"; and again in its broadest form, — "quod formae
non accipiunt divisionem nisi secundam materiam." These condem-
nations made a great stir. Old Albertus Magnus, who was the real
victim of attack, fought for himself and for Thomas. After a long and
earnest effort, the Thomists rooted out opposition in the order, and
carried their campaign to Rome. After fifty years of struggle, by use
of every method known in Church politics, the Dominican Order, in
1323, caused John XXII to canonize Thomas and in effect affirm his
doctrine.

The story shows how modern, how heterodox, how material, how
altogether new and revolutionary the system of Saint Thomas seemed
at first even in the schools; but that was the affair of the Church and
a matter of pure theology. We study only his art. Step by step, stone
by stone, we see him build his church-building like a stonemason,
"with the care that the twelfth-century architects put into " their work,

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 367

as Viollet-le-Duc saw some similar architect at Rouen, building the
tower of Saint- Romain : " He has thrown over his work the grace and
finesse, the study of detail, the sobriety in projections, the perfect har-
mony," which belongs to his school, and yet he was rigidly structural
and Norman. The foundation showed it; the elevation, which is God,
developed it; the vaulting, with its balance of thrusts in mind and
matter, proved it; but he had still the hardest task in art, to model
man.

The cathedral, then, is built, and God is built into it, but, thus
far, God is there alone, filling it all, and maintains the equilibrium by
balancing created matter separately against created mind. The pro-
portions of the building are superb; nothing so lofty, so large in treat-
ment, so true in scale, so eloquent of multiplicity in unity, has ever
been conceived elsewhere; but it was the virtue or the fault of superb
structures like Bourges and Amiens and the Church universal that
they seemed to need man more than man needed them; they were
made for crowds, for thousands and tens of thousands of human beings;
for the whole human race, on its knees, hungry for pardon and love.
Chartres needed no crowd, for it was meant as a palace of the Virgin,
and the Virgin filled it wholly; but the Trinity made their church for
no other purpose than to accommodate man, and made man for no
other purpose than to fill their church; if man failed to fill it, the
church and the Trinity seemed equally failures. Empty, Bourges and
Beauvais are cold; hardly as religious as a wayside cross; and yet,
even empty, they are perhaps more religious than when filled with
cattle and machines. Saint Thomas needed to fill his Church with real
men, and although he had created his own God for that special pur-
pose, the task was, as every boy knew by heart, the most difficult that
Omnipotence had dealt with.

God, as Descartes justly said, we know! but what is man? The
schools answered: Man is a rational animal! So was apparently a dog,
or a bee, or a beaver, none of which seemed to need churches. Modern

368 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

science, with infinite effort, has discovered and announced that man
is a bewildering complex of energies, which helps little to explain his
relations with the ultimate substance or energy or prime motor whose
existence both science and schoolmen admit ; which science studies in
laboratories and religion worships in churches. The man whom God
created to fill his Church, must be an energy independent of God;
otherwise God filled his own Church with his own energy. Thus far,
the God of Saint Thomas was alone in His Church. The beings He had
created out of nothing — Omar's pipkins of clay and shape — stood
against the walls, waiting to receive the wine of life, a life of their own.
Of that life, energy, will, or wine, — whatever the poets or professors
called it, — God was the only cause, as He was also the immediate
cause, and support. Thomas was emphatic on that point. God is
the cause of energy as the sun is the cause of colour: "prout sol dici-
tur causa manifestationis coloris." He not only gives forms to his pip-
kins, or energies to his agents, but He also maintains those forms in
being: " dat formas creaturis agentibus et eas tenet in esse." He acts
directly, not through secondary causes, on everything and every one:
"Deus in omnibus intime operatur." If, for an instant, God's ac-
tion, which is also His will, were to stop, the universe would not merely
fall to pieces, but would vanish, and must then be created anew from
nothing: "Quia non habet radicem in aere, statim cessat lumen,
cessante actione solis. Sic autem se habet omnis creatura ad Deum
sicut aer ad solem illumlnantem." God radiates energy as the sun
radiates light, and "the whole fabric of nature would return to no-
thing" if that radiation ceased even for an instant. Everything is
created by one instantaneous, eternal, universal act of will, and by the
same act is maintained in being.

Where, then, — in what mysterious cave outside of creation, —
could man, and his free will, and his private world of responsibilities
and duties, lie hidden? Unless man was a free agent in a world of his
own beyond constraint, the Church was a fraud, and it helped little

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 369

to add that the State was another. If God was the sole and immediate
cause and support of everything in His creation, God was also the cause
of its defects, and could not — being Justice and Goodness in essence
— hold man responsible for His own omissions. Still less could the
State or Church do it in His name.

Whatever truth lies in the charge that the schools discussed futile
questions by faulty methods, one cannot decently deny that in this
case the question was practical and the method vital. Theist or atheist,
monist or anarchist must all admit that society and science are equally
interested with theology in deciding whether the universe is one or
many, a harmony or a discord. The Church and State asserted that
it was a harmony, and that they were its representatives. They say
so still. Their claim led to singular but unavoidable conclusions,
with which society has struggled for seven hundred years, and is still
struggling.

Freedom could not exist in nature, or even in God, after the single,
unalterable act or will which created. The only possible free will was
that of God before the act. Abelard with his rigid logic averred that
God had no freedom ; being Himself whatever is most perfect. He pro-
duced necessarily the most perfect possible world. Nothing seemed
more logical, but if God acted necessarily. His world must also be of
necessity the only possible product of His act, and the Church became
an impertinence, since man proved only fatuity by attempting to
interfere. Thomas dared not disturb the foundations of the Church,
and therefore began by laying down the law that God — previous to His
act — could choose, and had chosen, whatever scheme of creation He
pleased, and that the harmony of the actual scheme proved His per-
fections. Thus he saved God's free will.

This philosophical apse would have closed the lines and finished the
plan of his church-choir had the universe not shown some divergencies
or discords needing to be explained. The student of the Latin Quarter
was then harder to convince than now that God was Infinite Love and

370 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

His world a perfect harmony, when perfect love and harmony showed
ihem, even in the Latin Quarter, and still more in revealed truth, a
picture of suffering, sorrow, and death; plague, pestilence, and famine;
inundations, droughts, and frosts; catastrophes world-wide and acci-
dents in corners; cruelty, perversity, stupidity, uncertainty, insanity;
virtue begetting vice; vice working for good; happiness without sense,
selfishness without gain, misery without cause, and horrors undefined.
The students in public dared not ask, as Voltaire did, " avec son hideux
sourire," whether the Lisbon earthquake was the final proof of God's
infinite goodness, but in private they used the argumentum ad per-
sonam divinam freely enough, and when the Church told them that
evil did not exist, the ribalds laughed.

Saint Augustine certainly tempted Satan when he fastened the
Church to this doctrine that evil is only the privation of good, an
amissio boni; and that good alone exists. The point was infinitely ^
troublesome. Good was order, law, unity. Evil was disorder, anarchy,
multiplicity. Which was truth? The Church had committed itself to
the dogma that order and unity were the ultimate truth, and that the
anarchist should be burned. She could do nothing else, and society
supported her — still supports her; yet the Church, who was wiser
than the State, had always seen that Saint Augustine dealt with only
half the question. She knew that evil might be an excess of good
as well as absence of it; that good leads to evil, evil to good; and
that, as Pascal says, "three degrees of polar elevation upset all juris-
prudence; a meridian decides truth; fundamental laws change; rights
have epochs. Pleasing Justice! bounded by a river or a mountain.'
truths on this side the Pyrenees! errors beyond!" Thomas conceded
that God Himself, with the best intentions, might be the source of evil,
and pleaded only that his action might in the end work benefits. He
could offer no proof of it, but he could assume as probable a plan
of good which became the more perfect for the very reason that it
allowed great liberty in detail.

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 371

One hardly feels Saint Thomas here in all his force. He offers
suggestion rather than proof; — apology — the weaker because of
obvious effort to apologize — rather than defence, for Infinite Good-
ness, Justice, and Power; scoffers might add that he invented a new
proof ab defectu, or argument for proving the perfection of a machine
by the number of its imperfections; but at all events, society has
never done better by way of proving its right to enforce morals or
unity of opinion. Unless it asserts law, it can only assert force. Rigid
theology went much further. In God's providence, man was as nothing.
With a proper sense of duty, every solar system should be content to
suffer, if thereby the efficiency of the Milky Way were improved. Such
theology shocked Saint Thomas, who never wholly abandoned man
in order to exalt God. He persistently brought God and man together,
and if he erred, the Church rightly pardons him because he erred on
the human side. Whenever the path lay through the valley of despair
he called God to his aid, as though he felt the moral obligation of the
Creator to help His creation.

At best the vision of God, sitting forever at His work-table, willing
the existence of mankind exactly as it is, while conscious that, among
these myriad arbitrary creations of His will, hardly one in a million
could escape temporary misery or eternal damnation, was not the best
possible background for a Church, as the V'^irgin and the Saviour
frankly admitted by taking the foreground ; but the Church was not
responsible for it. Mankind could not admit an anarchical — a dual
or a multiple — universe. The world was there, staring them in the
face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted on its unity
in self-defence. Society still insists on treating it as unity, though no
^longer affecting logic. Society insists on its free will, although free will
has never been explained to the satisfaction of any but those who much
wish to be satisfied, and although the words in any common sense
N implied not unity but duality in creation. The Church had nothing
to do with inventing this riddle — the oldest that fretted mankind.

372 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

Apart from all theological interferences, — fall of Adam or fault ol
Eve, Atonement, Justification, or Redemption, — either the universe
was one, or it was two, or it was many; either energy was one, seen
only in powers of itself, or it was several ; either God was harmony, or
He was discord. With practical unanimity, mankind rejected the dual
or multiple scheme; it insisted on unity. Thomas took the question
as it was given him. The unity was full of defects; he did not deny
them ; but he claimed that they might be incidents, and that the ad-
mitted unity might even prove their beneficence. Granting this
enormous concession, he still needed a means of bringing into the sys-
tem one element which vehemently refused to be brought : — that is,
Man himself, who insisted that the universe was a unit, but that he
was a universe; that energy was one, but that he was another energy;
that God was omnipotent, but that man was free. The contradiction
had always existed, exists still, and always must exist, unless man
either admits that he is a machine, or agrees that anarchy and chaos
are the habit of nature, and law and order its accident. The agree-
ment may become possible, but it was not possible in the thirteenth
century nor is it now. Saint Thomas's settlement could not be a
simple one or final, except for practical use, but it served, and it holds
good still.

No one ever seriously affirmed the literal freedom of will. Absolute
liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the
ideally free individual is responsible only to himself. This principle is
the philosophical foundation of anarchism, and, for anything that
science has yet proved, may be the philosophical foundation of the
universe; but it is fatal to all society and is especially hostile to the
State. Perhaps the Church of the thirteenth century might have found
a way to use even this principle for a good purpose; certainly, the
influence of Saint Bernard was sufficiently unsocial and that of Saint
Francis was sufficiently unselfish to conciliate even anarchists of the
militant class; but Saint Thomas was working for the Church and the

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 373

State, not for the salvation of souls, and his chief object was to repress
anarchy. The theory of absolute free will never entered his mind, more
than the theory of material free will would enter the mind of an archi-
tect. The Church gave him no warrant for discussing the subject
in such a sense. In fact, the Church never admitted free will, or used
the word when it could be avoided. In Latin, the term used was
"liberum arbitrium," — free choice, — and in French to this day it
remains in strictness "libre arbitre" still. From Saint Augustine
downwards the Church was never so unscientific as to admit of liberty
beyond the faculty of choosing between paths, some leading through
the Church and some not, but all leading to the next world ; as a crimi-
nal might be allowed the liberty of choosing between the guillotine and
the gallows, without infringing on the supremacy of the judge.

Thomas started from that point, already far from theoretic freedom.
"We are masters of our acts," he began, "in the sense that we can
choose such and such a thing; now, we have not to choose our end, but
the means that relate to it, as Aristotle says." Unfortunately, even
this trenchant amputation of man's free energies would not accord
with fact or with logic. Experience proved that man's power of choice
in action was very far from absolute, and logic seemed to require that
every choice should have some predetermining cause which decided
the will to act. Science affirmed that choice was not free, — could not
be free, — without abandoning the unity of force and the foundation
of law. Society insisted that its choice must be left free, whatever
became of science or unity. Saint Thomas was required to illustrate
the theory of "liberum arbitrium" by choosing a path through these
difficulties, where path there was obviously none.

Thomas's method of treating this problem was sure to be as scientific
as the vaulting of a Gothic arch. Indeed, one follows it most easily
by translating his school-vocabulary into modern technical terms.
With very slight straining of equivalents, Thomas might now be written
thus; —

374 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND GHARTRES

By the term God, is meant a prime motor which supplies all energy
to the universe, and acts directly on man as well as on all other
creatures, moving him as a mechanical motor might do; but man, be-
ing specially provided with an organism more complex than the organ-
isms of other creatures, enjoys an exceptional capacity for reflex action,
— a power of reflection, — which enables him within certain limits to
choose between paths; and this singular capacity is called free choice
or free will. Of course, the reflection is not choice, and though a man's
mind reflected as perfectly as the facets of a lighthouse lantern, it
would never reach a choice without an energy which impels it to act.

Now let us read Saint Thomas : —

Some kind of an agent Is required to determine one's choice; that agent is
reflection. Man reflects, then, in order to learn what choice to make between the
two acts which offer themselves. But reflection is, in its turn, a faculty of doing
opposite things, for we can reflect or not reflect; and we are no further forward
than before. One cannot carry back this process infinitely, for in that case one
would never decide. The fixed point is not in man, since we meet in him, as a being
apart by himself, only the alternative faculties; we must, therefore, recur to the
intervention of an exterior agent who shall impress on our will a movement cap-
able of putting an end to its hesitations: — That exterior agent is nothing else
than God!

The scheme seems to differ little, and unwillingly, from a system of
dynamics as modern as the dynamo. Even in the prime motor, fron
the moment of action, freedom of will vanished. Creation was not suc-
cessive; it was one instantaneous thought and act, identical with the
will, and was complete and unchangeable from end to end, including
time as one of its functions. Thomas was as clear as possible on that
point: — "Supposing God wills anything in effect; He cannot will not
to will it, because His will cannot change." He wills that some things
shall be contingent and others necessary, but He wills in the same act
that the contingency shall be necessary. "They are contingent because
God has willed them to be so, and with this object has subjected them
to causes which are so." In the same way He wills that His creation
shall develop itself in time and space and sequence, but He creates

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 375

' hese conditions as well as the events. He creates the whole, in one /
ict, complete, unchangeable, and it is then unfolded like a rolling
panorama, with its predetermined contingencies.

Man's free choice — liberum arbitrium — falls easily into place as
a predetermined contingency. God is the first cause, and acts in all
secondary causes directly; but while He acts mechanically on the rest
of creation, — as far as is known, — He acts freely at one point, and
this free action remains free as far as it extends on that line. Man's
freedom derives from this source, but it is simply apparent, as far as
he is a cause ; it is a reflex action determined by a new agency of the
first cause.

However abstruse these ideas may once have sounded, they are far
from seeming difficult in comparison with modern theories of energy.
Indeed, measured by that standard, the only striking feature of Saint
Thomas's motor is its simplicity. Thomas's prime motor was very
powerful, and its lines of energy were infinite. Among these infinite
lines, a certain group ran to the human race, and, as long as the con-
duction was perfect, each man acted mechanically. In cases where the
current, for any reason, was for a moment checked, — that is to say,
produced the effect of hesitation or reflection in the mind, — the cur-
rent accumulated until it acquired power to leap the obstacle. As Saint
Thomas expressed it, the Prime Motor, Who was nothing else than
God, intervened to decide the channel of the current. The only differ-
ence between man and a vegetable was the reflex action of the com-
plicated mirror which was called mind, and the mark of mind was
reflective absorption or choice. The apparent freedom was an illusion
arising from the extreme delicacy of the machine, but the motive
power was in fact the same — that of God.

This exclusion of what men commonly called freedom was carried
still further in the process of explaining dogma. Supposing the con-
duction to be insufficient for a given purpose; a purpose which shall
require perfect conduction? Under ordinary circumstances, in ninety-

376 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

nine cases out of a hundred, the conductor will be burned out, so to
speak; condemned, and thrown away. This is the case with most
human beings. Yet there are cases where the conductor is capable of
receiving an increase of energy from the prime motor, which enables
it to attain the object aimed at. In dogma, this store of reserved energy
is technically called Grace. In the strict, theological sense of the word,
as it is used by Saint Thomas, the exact, literal meaning of Grace is
"amotion which the Prime Motor, as a supernatural cause, produces
in the soul, perfecting free will." It is a reserved energy, which comes
to aid and reinforce the normal energy of the battery.

To religious minds this scientific inversion of solemn truths seems,
and is, sacrilege; but Thomas's numerous critics in the Church have
always brought precisely this charge against his doctrine, and are
doing so still. They insist that he has reduced God to a mechanism
and man to a passive conductor of force. He has left, they say, nothing
but God in the universe. The terrible word which annihilates all other
philosophical systems against which it is hurled, has been hurled freely
against his for six hundred years and more, without visibly affecting
the Church; and yet its propriety seems, to the vulgar, beyond reason =
able cavil. To Father de R6gnon, of the extremely learned and intelli-
gent Society of Jesus, the difference between pantheism and Thomism
reduces itself to this: " Pantheism, starting from the notion of an infin>
ite substance which is the plenitude of being, concludes that there
can exist no other beings than the being; no other realities than the
absolute reality. Thomism, starting from the efficacy of the first cause,
tends to reduce more and more the efficacy of second causes, and to
replace it by a passivity which receives without producing, which is
determined without determining." To students of architecture, who
know equally little about pantheism and about Thomism, — or,
indeed, for that matter, about architecture, too, — the quality that
rouses most surprise in Thomism is its astonishingly scientific method.
The Franciscans and the Jesuits call it pantheism, but science, too, is

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 377

pantheism, or has till very recently been wholly pantheistic. Avowedly
science has aimed at nothing but the reduction of multiplicity to unity,
and has excommunicated, as though it were itself a Church, any one
who doubted or disputed its object, its method, or its results. The
effort is as evident and quite as laborious in modern science, starting
as it does from multiplicity, as in Thomas Aquinas, who started from
unity; and it is necessarily less successful, for its true aims, as far as it is
science and not disguised religion, were equally attained by reaching
infinite complexity; but the assertion or assumption of ultimate unity
has characterized the Law of Energy as emphatically as it has char-
acterized the definition of God in theology. If it is a reproach to Saint
Thomas, it is equally a reproach to Clerk-Maxwell. In truth, it is what
men most admire in both — the power of broad and lofty generalization.
Under any conceivable system the process of getting God and man
under the same roof — of bringing two independent energies under
the same control — required a painful effort, as science has much
cause to know. No doubt, many good Christians and some heretics
have been shocked at the tour de force by which they felt themselves
suddenly seized, bound hand and foot, attached to each other, and
dragged into the Church, without consent or consultation. To reli-
gious mystics, whose scepticism concerned chiefly themselves and their
own existence, Saint Thomas's man seemed hardly worth herding, at
so much expense and trouble, into a Church where he was not eager to
go. True religion felt the nearness of God without caring to see the
mechanism. Mystics like Saint Bernard, Saint Francis, Saint Bona-
venture, or Pascal had a right to make this objection, since they got
into the Church, so to speak, by breaking through the windows; but
society at large accepted and retains Saint Thomas's man much as
Saint Thomas delivered him to the Government; a two-sided being,
free or unfree, responsible or irresponsible, an energy or a victim of
energy, moved by choice or moved by compulsion, as the interests of
society seemed for the moment to need. Certainly Saint Thomas

378 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

lavished no excess of liberty on the man he created, but still he was
more generous than the State has ever been. Saint Thomas asked
little from man, and gave much; even as much freedom of will as the
State gave or now gives ; he added immortality hereafter and eternal
happiness under reasonable restraints; his God watched over man's
temporal welfare far more anxiously than the State has ever done, and
assigned him space in the Church which he never can have in the
galleries of Parliament or Congress; more than all this. Saint Thomas
and his God placed man in the centre of the universe, and made the
sun and the stars for his uses. No statute law ever did as much for
man, and no social reform ever will try to do it; yet man bitterly com-
plained that he had not his rights, and even in the Church is still com-
plaining, because Saint Thomas set a limit, more or less vague, to what
the man was obstinate in calling his freedom of will.

Thus Saint Thomas completed his work, keeping his converging
lines clear and pure throughout, and bringing them together, unbroken,
in the curves that gave unity to his plan. His sense of scale and pro-
portion was that of the great architects of his age. One might go on
studying it for a lifetime. He showed no more hesitation in keeping
his Deity in scale than in adjusting man to it. Strange as it sounds,
although man thought himself hardly treated in respect to freedom,
yet, if freedom meant superiority, man was in action much the
superior of God, Whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas, under
restraints that man never would have tolerated. Saint Thomas did
not allow God even an undetermined will ; He was pure Act, and as
such He could not change. Man alone was allowed, in act, to change
direction. What was more curious still, man might absolutely prove
his freedom by refusing to move at all ; if he did not like his life he could
stop it, and habitually did so, or acquiesced in its being done for him;
while God could not commit suicide or even cease for a single instant
His continuous action. If man had the singular fancy of making him-
self absurd, — a taste confined to himself but attested by evidence

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 379

exceedingly strong, — he could be as absurd as he liked; but God
could not be absurd. Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right
to contradict Himself, which is one of man's chief pleasures. While
man enjoyed what was, for his purposes, an unlimited freedom to be
wicked, — a privilege which, as both Church and State bitterly com-
plained and still complain, he has outrageously abused, — God was
Goodness, and could be nothing else. While man m.oved about his
relatively spacious prison with a certain degree of ease, God, being
everywhere, could not move. In one respect, at least, man's freedom
seemed to be not relative but absolute, for his thought was an energy
paying no regard to space or time or order or object or sense; but God's
thought was His act and will at once ; speaking correctly, God could not
think; He is. Saint Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God
was Necessity, as Abelard seems to have held, but he refused to toler-
ate the idea of a divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself.
The atmosphere of Saint Louis surrounds the God of Saint Thomas,
and its pure ether shuts out the corruption and pollution to come, —
the Valois and Bourbons, the Occams and Hobbes's, the Tudors and
the Medicis, of an enlightened Europe.

The theology turns always into art at the last, and ends in aspira-
tion. The spire justifies the church. In Saint Thomas's Church, man's
free will was the aspiration to God, and he treated it as the architects
of Chartres and Laon had treated their famous fleches. The square
foundation-tower, the expression of God's power in act, — His Creation,
— rose to the level of the Church fagade as a part of the normal unity
of God's energy; and then, suddenly, without show of effort, without
break, without logical violence, became a many-sided, voluntary,
vanishing human soul, and neither Villard de Honnecourt nor Duns
Scotus could distinguish where God's power ends and man's free will
begins. All they saw was the soul vanishing into the skies. How it
was done, one does not care to ask; in a result so exquisite, one has not
the heart to find fault with "adresse."

38o MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

About Saint Thomas's theology we need not greatly disturb our-
selves; it can matter now not much, whether he put more pantheism
than the law allowed or more materialism than Duns Scotus approved
— or less of either — into his universe, since the Church is still on
the spot, responsible for its own doctrines; but his architecture is an-
other matter. So scientific and structural a method was never an acci-
dent or the property of a single mind even with Aristotle to prompt it.
Neither his Church nor the architect's church was a sketch, but a com-
pletely studied structure. Every relation of parts, every disturbance
of equilibrium, every detail of construction was treated with infinite
labour, as the result of two hundred years of experiment and discussion
among thousands of men whose minds and whose instincts were acute,
and who discussed little else. Science and art were one. Thomas
Aquinas would probably have built a better cathedral at Beauvais
than the actual architect who planned it ; but it is quite likely that the
architect might have saved Thomas some of his errors, as pointed out
by the Councils of 1276. Both were great artists; perhaps in their
professions, the greatest that ever lived; and both must have been
great students beyond their practice. Both were subject to constant
criticism from men and bodies of men whose minds were as acute and
whose learning was as great as their own. If the Archbishop of Can-
terbury and the Bishop of Paris condemned Thomas, the Bernardines
had, for near two hundred years, condemned Beauvais in advance.
Both the "Summa Theologise" and Beauvais Cathedral were exces-
sively modern, scientific, and technical, marking the extreme points
reached by Europe on the lines of scholastic science. This is all we
need to know. If we like, we can go on to study, inch by inch, the slow
decline of the art. The essence of it — the despotic central idea — was
that of organic unity both in the thought and the building. From that
time, the universe has steadily become more complex and less re-
ducible to a central control. With as much obstinacy as though it were
human, it has insisted on expanding its parts; with as much elusive-

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 381

ness as though it were feminine, it has evaded the attempt to impose on
it a single will. Modern science, like modern art, tends, in practice,
to drop the dogma of organic unity. Some of the mediaeval habit of
mind survives, but even that is said to be yielding before the daily
evidence of increasing and extending complexity. The fault, then, was
not in man, if he no longer looked at science or art as an organic whole
or as the expression of unity. Unity turned itself into complexity,
multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction. All experience, human
and divine, assured man in the thirteenth century that the lines of the
universe converged. How was he to know that these lines ran in every
conceivable and inconceivable direction, and that at least half of them
seemed to diverge from any imaginable centre of unity! Dimly conscious
that his Trinity required in logic a fourth dimension, how was the
schoolman to supply it, when even the mathematician of to-day can
only infer its necessity? Naturally man tended to lose his sense of scale
and relation. A straight line, or a combination of straight lines, may
have still a sort of artistic unity, but what can be done in art with a
series of negative symbols? Even if the negative were continuous, the
artist might express at least a negation; but supposing that Omar's
kinetic analogy of the ball and the players turned out to be a scientific
formula! — supposing that the highest scientific authority, in order to
obtain any unity at all, had to resort to the Middle Ages for an imagi-
nary demon to sort his atoms! — how could art deal with such prob-
lems, and what wonder that art lost unity with philosophy and science ! '
Art had to be confused in order to express confusion ; but perhaps it
was truest, so.

Some future summer, when you are older, and when I have left,
like Omar, only the empty glass of my scholasticism for you to turn
down, you can amuse yourselves by going on with the story after the
death of Saint Louis, Saint Thomas, and William of Lorris, and after
the failure of Beauvais. The pathetic interest of the drama deepens
with every new expression, but at least you can learn from it that

382 MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES

your parents in the nineteenth century were not to blame for losing
ihe sense of unity in art. As early as the fourteenth century, signs of
unsteadiness appeared, and, before the eighteenth century, unity be-
came only a reminiscence. The old habit of centralizing a strain at one
point, and then dividing and subdividing it, and distributing it on
visible lines of support to a visible foundation, disappeared in archi-
tecture soon after 1500, but lingered in theology two centuries longer,
and even, in very old-fashioned communities, far down to our own
time ; but its values were forgotten, and it survived chiefly as a stock
jest against the clergy. The passage between the two epochs is as
beautiful as the Slave of Michael Angelo; but, to feel its beauty, you
ohould see it from above, as it came from its radiant source. Truth,
indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what
men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sym-
pathy. The architects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took the
^hurch and the universe for truths, and tried to express them in a
structure which should be final. Knowing by an enormous experience
precisely where the strains were to come, they enlarged their scale to
the utmost point of material endurance, lightening the load and dis-
tributing the burden until the gutters and gargoyles that seem mere
ornament, and the grotesques that seem rude absurdities, all do work
either for the arch or for the eye; and every inch of material, up and
down, from crypt to vault, from man to God, from the universe to the
atom, had its task, giving support where support was needed, or weight
where concentration was felt, but always with the condition of showing
conspicuously to the eye the great lines which led to unity and the
curves which controlled divergence; so that, from the cross on the
fl^che and the keystone of the vault, down through the ribbed nervures,
the columns, the windows, to the foundation of the flying buttresses
far beyond the walls, one idea controlled every line; and this is true
of Saint Thomas's Church as it is of Amiens Cathedral. The method
was the same for both, and the result was an art marked by singular

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS 383

unity, which endured and served its purpose until man changed hi<
attitude toward the universe. The trouble was not in the art or the
method or the structure, but in the universe itself which presented
different aspects as man moved. Granted a Church, Saint Thomas's
Church was the most expressive that man has made, and the great
Gothic cathedrals were its most complete expression.

Perhaps the best proof of it is their apparent instability. Of all
the elaborate symbolism which has been suggested for the Gothic
cathedral, the most vital and most perfect may be that the slender
nervure, the springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards
of the flying buttress, — the visible effort to throw off a visible strain,
— never let us forget that Faith alone supports it, and that, if Faith
fails, Heaven is lost. The equilibrium is visibly delicate beyond the
line of safety; danger lurks in every stone. The peril of the heavy
tower, of the restless vault, of the vagrant buttress; the uncertainty
of logic, the inequalities of the syllogism, the irregularities of the
mental mirror, — all these haunting nightmares of the Church are
expressed as strongly by the Gothic cathedral as though it had been
the cry of human suffering, and as no emotion had ever been expressed
before or is likely to find expression again. The delight of its aspira-
tions is flung up to the sky. The pathos of its self-distrust and anguish
of doubt is buried in the earth as its last secret. You can read out of it
whatever else pleases your youth and confidence; to me, this is all.

THE END

INDEX

Aaron, window at Chartres, i86.
Abbatial buildings, 37.
Abbaye-aux-Dames and Abbaye-aux-Hom-
mes at Caen, 6, 52, 200.

de Citeaux, 38, 42, 92, 287.

de Clairvaux, 36, 38, 42, 92, 281.

de Cluny, 38, 42.

de Saint Gildas-de-Rhuys, 309-318.

de Saint-Leu-d'Esserent, 58, 59, 64, 116,
214.

de Saint-Victor, 292, 325, 332, 333.

de Saint-Denis. {See Saint-Denis.)
Abbot, rank and duties of, 38.
Ab^lard, Pierre du Pallet, 36, 139, 140, 174,
249, 322.

his hymns to the Virgin, 93, 255.

his love-songs, 220, 286.

his statement of the Virgin's rank in
theology, 257.

his origin and career, 288-318.

his Historia Calamitatum, 290-316.

his gloss on Porphyry, 300.

his condemnation in 1 121, 306, 316.

his condemnation in 1 140, 316, 317.

his death, 318.

{See H61oise, Peter the Venerable, Saint
Bernard, William of Champeaux,
Suger, John of Salisbury.)
Abraham and Isaac, in the north porch of

Chartres Cathedral, 84, 117, 183.
Abydos, 100.

Acquitaine. {See Guienne.)
Adam, mystery play, 206.
Adam de Saint-Victor, 93, 117, 326.

his hymns to the Virgin, 96, 97, 329,

331-
to the Trinity, 326.
to the Holy Ghost, 327.
on scholasticism, 328.
miracle of, 330.
epitaph of, 333.
Adam de la Halle, 235, 242, 253, 255.

his play of Robin and Marion, 242-46.
Agnes Sorel, 246.
Alain of Lille, 357, 358.

Albertus Magnus, Doctor universalis, 288,
347. 348, 366. _
his liber de laudibus, 93, 143.
his collected works, 258.
Albi, cathedral at, 109.
Alda, in the Chanson de Roland, 23, 30, 34^
Alexander H, Pope, 4.
Alexander Hales, 347.
Alexandrine gingerbread, 217.
Alfonso of Portugal, 82.
Alix, Duchess of Brittany, married to Pierre

de Dreux, 85, 88, 182.
Alix de Champagne, queen of Louis VII of

France (i 160-1206), 150, 152, 212.
Alix de France, married to Count Thibaut

of Chartres, 150, 152, 203, 212, 223.
Alix de France, affianced to Richard Coeur-de-

Lion, 212.
Alix of Savoy, queen of Louis VI of France,

74, 78, 203.
Almogenes. {See Hermogenes.)
Amaury de Montfort, at Chartres, 156,
Amboise, chateau of, 42.
Amiens Cathedral (Notre Dame), 47, 49, 71,
89, 91, 192, 322, 347, 350, 367.
Beau Christ of, i.
statuary of, 79, 80, 100.
height of vault, 109.
rose window of, 115.
apse of, 125.
Thierry, Bishop of, 104.
Ane qui vielle, loi, 128.
Angels, hierarchy of, window at Chartres,
iSi, 184.
not individual but species, 364-65.
Angers, hall of bishop's palace, 36.
chiteau of, 42.

cathedral of (Saint Maurice), 116; glass
of, 136.
Angevin school, 109.

Anjou, County of, in the CAan50»(i«i?o/an(f, 27.
Geoffrey Plantagenet of, 203, 211.
Henry of, King of England, 210, 21 1, •
marries Eleanor of Guienne, 212.
Anne. {See Saint Anne.)

386

INDEX

Anne, Duchess of Brittany, Queen of France

(1476-1514), 91.
Antioch, 211.

Apocalypse, figures of, 72, 187.
Apses and choirs, 10, 50, 100, 1 18-127.
Aquilon, the, at Mont-Saint-Michel, 33, 34,

307-
Aquino, the birthplace of Saint Thomas, 164,

338, 348.
Arab philosophy, 175, 305, 362.
Arcs boutants. {See Buttressing.)
Arcs doubleaux and arcs formerets, 35.
Argenteuil, abbey of, 309.
Aristotle, at Chartres, 73, 93.

his attraction to French thought, 141,
175, 176, 290, 295, 351, 360, 361.

bridled, 205.

his authority in the schools, 294, 313, 321.

adopted by the Church, 347, 350, 351,
355. 360, 373-
Aries, architectural school of, 60; sculptures,

70.
Arlette, mother of William the Bastard, 53.
Armancourt. "Notes h^raldiques et g6n6-

alogiques, 1908," 156, 157.
Arnold, Matthew, 334.
Arques, chiteau of, 42.
Arts, the seven liberal, 73, 93.
Assisi {see Francis), 12.

church at, 109.

country of, 334.
Assumption of the Virgin, 79.
Aucassins et Nicolete, 157, 219, 230-41, 276,

277, 278.
Aufin, dauphin, fou, in chess, 205.
Augustine. {See Saint Augustine.)
Autun, cathedral of (Saint Lazare), 70, 71.
Auvergne, architectural school of, 61, 1 19.
Auxerre, 94, 310.

cathedral of (Saint-Etienne), glass at,
146, 159, 162.

docker de Saint-Germain, 49, 65.
Ave Maria, 259, 275, 281.

Stella Maris, 34, 93, 97, 329, 330.
Averroes, 140, 307, 315.
Avicenna, 141, 315.
Avignon, 225. ,,

Avranches, 2, 36.

Bacon, Lord Verulam, 315; rejected the

syllogism, 335, 336, 338.

Bakers' window at Chartres, 172, 181.

Baronius, his Ecclesiastical Annals, 165.

Barry, Madame du, 9, 250.

Bath, the, in the Middle Ages, 242.

Battle Abbey, roll of, 21.

Battle-cries, 34, 94.

Bayeux, cathedral of (Notre Dame), 91.

its towers, 7, 51, 53, 54, 65.

tapestry of Queen Matilda, 18, 19.

eleventh-century architecture, 4, 32.
Beam, 94.

Beaucaire. {See Aucassins.)
Beauce, plain of, 62, 137.
Beaugency, on the Loire, 21 1.
Beaumont, in Normandy, I, 12.

in Le Perche, 158.
Beauvais, cathedral of (Saint-Pierre), 9, 99.
no, 192, 334, 348, 350, 367, 380, 381,

apse of, 125.

church of Saint-Etienne, rose of, 116.

Abbey of Saint Lucien, 310.

architects of cathedral, 51, 379.
Beaux Arts, Ecole des, 35, 109, no, 350.
Belle Verri^re, window at Chartres, 146, 147.

149, 161, 181.
Benedictines, 4, 12, 342, 343.
Benoist, Norman chronicle of, 18, 22.
Benoit-sur-Loire, church of, 5, 6.
Berch^res I'EvqSue, quarry of, 104, 1 16,

162.
B^renger, sieur du Pallet, father of Ab^lard,

288.
Bernard {see Saint Bernard), Abbot of Clair-
vaux (1090-1153), 12, 34, 36, 49, 106,
129, 161, 163, 202, 210, 213, 281, 282,
322.

his crusade, 103.

his hymns and sermons, 92, 93, 96, 255,
_ 278, 330.

his origin, 287.

establishes Clairvaux, 92, 303, 308.

his controversy with Abfelard, 293-318.

his political authority, 202, 310-317.

described by H61oise, 287.

described by Peter the Venerable, 318.

his controversy with Gilbert de la Porde,
320.

his rules, 342, 343.
Berou, Robert de, his window, 155.
Bestiaries, loi.
Biblioth^que Nationale, 66, 129.

INDEX

387

Blanche of Castile (i 187-1252), queen of
Louis VIII, mother of Saint Louis, 78,
81, 82, 88, 117, 144, 156, 201, 207, 273,

275-
her influence at Chartres, 117, 144, 166,

181, 193-
her quarrel with the students, 175, 275.
her rose window at Chartres, 1 85, 186.
genealogical table of, 203.
her relations with Thibaut of Cham-
pagne, 155, 189, 225-229, 253.
her marriage to Louis VIII, 224.
queen and regent, 224, 225, 334.
Blois, city of, 211.

hall of chateau, 42.
apartments of, 91.
Blondel, 231.

Blue, value of, 130, 131, 135, 154.
Bluebeard, 207.

Bollstadt in Swabia, Counts of, 347.
Bonaventure, Saint, 353, 377.
Boscherville, in Normandy, 53, 65.
Bosham, port of Chichester, 18.
Boulogne, Countess Mahaut, or Matilda, of,

81,82.
Bourbon kings of France (1589-1793), 91, 255.
Bourdillon, F. W., 230.
Bourges, cathedral of (Saint-Etienne), 47, 89,
102, no, 193.
apse of, 124, 125.
Last Judgment, at, 71.
Monograph on, 95, 129, 175.
twelfth-century glass at, 136, 137.
thirteenth-century glass at, 166, 173, 175.
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century glass at,
192.
Bourgogne, 94.
Bramante, 67.
Bridan, Charles Antoine, sculptor (1767-73),

155. 156.
Brittany, Province of, 5, 27, 37, 174, 189.
{See Aboard.)
Dukes and Duchesses of:

Conan III (1112-48), 308.
Alix (1203-21), married in 1212 to

Pierre of Dreux, 85, 88.
death in 1221, 189.
her son, John I (1237-86), 189.
her daughter Yolande, 155, 189, 253.
Pierre de Dreux (Mauclerc), Duke
(1212-36), 85-88, 102, 117, 144, 184-

89; on the seventh crusade in 1248.
254-
Anne, Queen of France (14S8-1514), 91.
Buddha, Sakya Muni, 257, 326
Bullant, Jean, 67.

Bulteau, Abbd, his Monographic de la CatM-
drale de Chartres, 35, 73, 77, 82, 87,
88, 95, no, 154.
Burgundy, architectural school of, 60.
Butchers' windows at Chartres, etc., 173, 182.
Buttressing, 109.
Byzantium, 8, 32, 71, 75, 91.
Virgin of, 91, 95.
influence of, on glass, 134-35.

Caen in Normandy, 6, 1 1 , 52.
towers of, 49, 52.

Caheu, or Caieu, Ansel de, 150, 222.

Cairo, 134, 137, 140.

Calixtus II, his supposed decree of 1 122
declaring the Pseudo-Turpin authentic,
168.

Calvados, 3.

Canlico del sole, 344-46.

Carpenters and Coopers, their window at
Chartres, 171.

Carteret in Normandy, 5.

Castile {see Blanche and Ferdinand), arms of,
162, 184.

Catherine of Medicis, Queen of France, 91.

Caumont, Arcis de, his Histoire de VArchiteC'
lure Religieiise, 51.

Cefalu, cathedral, 4.

Cerisy-la-Foret, 10, 51.

Cervantes, 230. {See Quixote.)

Chalons-sur-Marne, glass at, 136-37.

Champagne, County of, 213, 217.
Counts of:

Henry (tii8o), 152, 202, 212.
Henry (1150-97), 202, 223.
Thibaut (ti20i), 152, 202, 223.
Thibaut-le-Grand (1201-53), '52, 155,
203, 224, 226, 231, 233; aflfianced to
Yolande of Brittany, 155, 189-90;
his poems, 227-29.
Countess Marie de France (fiigS), 159,
152; her marriage t. Henry of Cham-
pagne (1164), 212, 213; her influence
on poetry, 214, 218, 219; object of
Coeur-de-Lion's prison-song, 220-23;
widowhood and death, 223.

388

INDEX

Champeaux, William of, 286; his disputes
with Abelard, 290-303; patron of
Saint Bernard, 303.
Chanson de Roland, 5, 12, 17, 20-31, 35, 47,
168, 214; examples of the grand style,
25, 267; unreligious, 233; free from
grossness, 241 ; evangel of Saint
Francis, 335, 336.
Chansons de Geste, 17, 245, 258.
Chardonnel, Geoffroi, 172.
Charente, architecture of, 48, 60.
Charlemagne, defeated at Roncesvalles (778),
5. 20.
window at Chartres, 12, 168, 170, 176,

177, 193, 218, 231.
never sainted, 168.
in the first lines of the Chanson, 23.
in the last plaint of Roland, 26, 28, 30.
friend of Constantine VI, 32, 169.
ideal of Saint Francis, 12, 325, 336.
Charles VII, King of France (1422-61), 210,

246.
Chartres, County of, 56, 60, 100.
Counts of:
Thibaut (tii97). I50, 152, 203, 211,

212.
Louis (ti205), 151-52, 203, 223.
Thibaut VI (ti2i8), 150, 152, 154, 181,
203.
Countesses of:

Alix de France, 150, 152, 203, 212, 223.
Isabel, 203.
Bishops of, 154, 175, 177. (See Regnault
de Mougon, John of Salisbury.)
Chartres, Shrine of, 6, 123, 144-45.

Virgin of, always the Virgin of Majesty,

72, 95-103, 144-48-
her presence always felt, 105-12, 113,
128, 144, 147-48.
Chartres Cathedral. (Notre Dame.)
monograph on. {See Bulteau.)
guide-book of, 180. (5ee Clerval, Abb^.)
-meaning of, 89, 90, 95, 106, 108, 180-95,

325. 338.
rebuilt in 1145, 103, 105.
rebuilt, 1 195-1220, 40, 149, 154-58.
its solidity, 9, 104, no.
architecture and statuary of:

west portal, 6, 33, 35, 63, 69-72, 92,
108, 112, 129, 139, 141, 146, 147,
204, 287, 289.

southern tower and fl^che, 10, 49, 51,

54, 62, 64, 65-68, 103, 112.
northern tower and fl^che, 62, 66, 1 13.
arcade of kings, 63.
north porch, 63, 77-81, 184.
south porch, 63, 77, 84-88.
height of vault, no.
vaulting of choir and apse, 119-27,

159-67.
nave and transepts, no, 112, 129, 181.
western rose, 63, 66, 112, 116, ii7:

141-42.
northern rose, 116, n7, 143.
southern rose, 117, 143.
fenestration of, 99, 1 14.
buttresses of, 109.
glass of:

twelfth-century, 129-42.
thirteenth-century, in western rose,

142-45.
in the Rose de France, 143, 185-90.
in the Rose de Dreux, 143, 184-93.
in the apse, 149, 177.
in the nave, 180.
in the transepts, 181.
in the clerestory, 181-84, 192.
above the high-altar, 192-96.
fifteenth-century. Chapel of Vend&me,
181.
Chartres, church of Saint-Pierre in lower

town, glass of, 195.
Chatelet at Mont-Saint-Michel, 45.
Chatillon, Gaultier or Gaucher, 82.
Chatillon, Jean de, 155.
Chaucer, his Canterbury Pilgrimage, 16.
his Wife of Balh, 201.
his Legend of Good Women, 206.
his translations, 247-51.
Chess, game of, 204.
Chinon, chateau of, 210, 231.
Choirs and apses, 10, 50, n8-27, 149, 179,
Christ, at Amiens, I.

at Mont-Saint-Michel, 8.

at Byzantium, 71.

at Chartres, 71, 79, 84, 85, 102, 133-34.

163, 164, 183, 187.
absorbed in the Mother, 94-96, 262.
in the Trinity, 92, 274, 306, 307.
forgotten by Roland, 29.
reincarnated at Assisi, 338.
Christian of Troyes, 139, 214, 231.

INDEX

389

his Eric el Enide, 214.
his Tristan, 214, 215-19.
his Lancelot, 215, 220.
his Perceval, 215-19.
Church of the eleventh century, 3, 7, 285, 286.
of the twelfth century, 71, 302-18, 341,

344-45. (5ee AWlard, St. Bernard.)
of the thirteenth century, 71, loi, 226,
248, 341, 361, 377-81. {See Thomas
Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Saint Francis.)
secular tastes of, 9.

its attitude towards the Virgin and the
Holy Ghost, 80, 96, 262, 305, 341.
Citeaux, Abbey of, 38, 42, 92, 287, 303, 308.
Clairet, a drink, 217.

Clairvaux, Abbey of, founded by Saint Ber-
nard in 1115, 36, 38, 42, 92, 281, 308,

318,334-
Clemens vitrearius Carnotensis, 172.
Clement, Jacques, 256.
Clerk-Maxwell, James, 315, 377.
Clermont-Ferrand (Puy-de-Dome), church of
Notre Dame du Port, 6, 70, 119.
cathedral (Notre Dame), 67, 171.
Clerval, Abbe, his guidebook of Chartres, 180.
Clochers. {See Towers.)
Cloisters, at Mont-Saint-Michel, 44.
Cluny, Abbey of, 38, 42, 309, 317.
Cogito ergo sum, 323.
Cologne, Dominican school of, 140, 348.
Comnenus, John, Basileus, 92, 96.
Conan, Duke of Brittany, 308.
Conceptualism, 296, 297, 299-302, 306, 323,

353-
Conches in Normandy, 157, 209.
Conciergerie, Galerie Saint-Louis, 42.
Constantine VI, Emperor of the East,

32, 169.
Constantinople, 27, 91 {see Byzantium);

French Emperors of, 157.
Cordeliers at Paris, 334.
Cornard, Robert, inventor of pointed shoes,

204.
Cornificii, 322.

Coronation of the Virgin, 78, 79.
Corroyer, Edouard, Description de I'Abbaye

du Mont-Saint-Micliel (1887), 2, 11,

12, 39. 41- 51-
Cotentin, 2, 3.
Coucy, chSteau of, 42.
battle-cry of, 94.

chStelain de, 231.
Enguerrand de, 153, 190.
Couesnon, river boundary of Normandy and

Brittany, 20.
Councils, Church, at Ephesus (431), 91.

at Soissons (1121), condemns Abelard,

360, 317.
at Etampes (1130), 310.
at Pisa (1135). 312-
at Sens (1140), condemns Abelard, 315-

18, 320.
at Rheims (1148), condemns Gilbert de

la Poree, 320.
at Beaugency (1152), divorces Eleanor

of Guienne, 211.
at Paris (1276), condemns Thomas of

Aquino, 366.
at Oxford (1276), condemns Thomas of

Aquino, 366.
at Trent (1545-63). 349-
Court of Love, 213, 221, 246, 334.
Courtenay, Pierre de, and Isabel, 157.
Courteous Love, religion of, 213, 214.
drama of, 226.
poetry of, 214, 219, 226-50.
Courtesy, figure of, in the Roman de la Rose,

247.
Cousin, Victor, editor of Abfilard's works, 314.
Coutances, 2, 3, 7, 91.

cathedral of (Notre Dame), apse, 49, 50;
filches, 47-51; central tower, 51.
Crusade, the first (1096), 32, 69, 70, 92, 288.
the second (1147), 68, 92, 104.
the third (1190), 230.
the seventh (1248), 85, 254.
Crypt, of Chartres, I, 9, 34, in, 149, 283.
examples of, 34.
Gros Piliers, n, 35.
Curriers' window at Chartres, 181.

Damietta, 157, 253.

Daniel saved from the lions, 29; in Chartres

window, 187.
Dante, 93. 213, 214, 219, 226, 252; his prayer

to the Virgin, 251.
David, King, at Chartres, 84, 186.
Delacroix, Eugene, 138.
Descartes, Rene, 323, 349, 352, 360, 367.
Dialectics, srience of, 289.
Diane de Poitiers, 67.
Dies Ira, 329, 331-32.

390

INDEX

Domfront in Normandy, 36.

Dominic (Domingo de Guzman), Saint (i 170-

1221), 175, 342, 343, 347.
Dominican Schools, 343, 347, 348, 349, 366.
Don Quixote, 215, 230, 269.
Drapers' window at Ciiartres, 173, 181.
Dreux, County of. {See Pierre Mauclerc.)
Duns Scotus, doctor subtiiis, 349, 363, 380.
Durand, Paul, on Chartres glass, 129, 134,

136.
Durazzo, 157.
Durendal, Roland's sword, 26-28, 170.

Edward the Confessor, King of England, 18.
Egidio, Franciscan monk, 338.
Egypt, Joinville in, 253, 254.
Eleanor of Guienne, Queen of France and
England (1122-1202), 36, 68, 77, 150,
151, 152, 199, 213, 231, 313.
genealogical tables of, 152, 203.
story of her life, 202, 224, 225.
her death, 151, 224.
Elizabeth, Queen of England, 202, 264.
Energy, equivalent to scholastic Form, 332.
England, Norman conquest of, 2, 4, 9, 32.
her share in mediaeval literature, 140.
her civil war in 1215-16, 151, 153.
Enlart, Camille, Alaiiuel d' Architecture Reli-

gieuse, 34, 60.
Eracle, poem by Walter of Arras, 215.
Eric et Enide, poem by Christian of Troyes,

214.
Eriictavil, translation of psalm, 215.
Etampes (Seine-et-Oise), its church of Notre

Dame, 65, 116.
Euclid, 73, 294, 295.
Eustace, Saint, window of, at Chartres, 172,

173-
Eve, 198, 202, 277.

her dialogue with Satan, 205-206.
Evesham, battle of, 156.
Evil, an Amissio Boni, 370.
Evreux in Normandy, 209.
Ezekiel, in Chartres window, 187.

Fabliaux, 200, 245.
Fair Rosamund, 212.
Falaise, tower of, 10, 53, 54.
Faraday, Michael, 315, 321.
Fenestration, at the Merveille, 41, 42.
at Paris, Mantes, and Chartres, 56.

at Mantes, 56, 57.

at Chartres, 41, 56, 57, 99, 114.
Fenioux on the Charente, fleche of, 48.
Ferdinand of Castile. {See Saint Ferdinand.)
Ferragus, giant, 171.
Feversham, Abbot of, 310.
Filetus. {See Hermogenes.)
Fioretti or Floretum of Saint Francis, 164,

338.
Flaubert, Gustave, his Norman style, 55.
Fleches, in Normandy, 6, 10, 48-52.

at Coutances, 47-52.

at Vendome, 49.

at Auxerre, 49.

at Fenwux, 48.

in the lie de France, 58.

{See Chartres, Laon, Towers, etc.)
Fontevrault, Abbey of, 42, 224.
Form, scholastic term meaning that which
gives being to matter; the equivalent
of Energy, 320.
France {see lie de France), battle-cry of, 34,

94.
Francis I, King of France (1515-47), 67, 242.
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 12, 164, 213.

his birth, 334; his death, 334, 346.

his hostility to the Schools, 334-46.

his sermon to the birds, 44, 339, 340.

his pantheism, 340-46.

his Cantico del Sole, 344, 345.
Franciscan Schools, 286, 347, 349.
Free Will, liberum arbitrium, 286, 300, 323,

371. 376.

Freeman, Edward A., his History of the Nor-
man Conquest, 19, 200.

Fulbert, canon of Notre Dame de Paris, 36.

Fulk of Anjou, 222.

Furriers' window at Chartres, 168, 172, 173,

Gaillard, chateau of, 42.
Ganelon, the traitor, 23.
Garreau, L., his Etat social de la France au

temps des Croisades, 199.
Gascony, 68, 69. {See Guienne.)
Gassicourt, church below Mantes, 55.
Gaucher, or Gaultier, de Bar-sur-Seine, 157.
Gaucher, or Gaultier, de Chatillon, 82.
Gaultier de Coincy, his Miracles de la Vierge,

258, 259, 272, 278, 328.
Geoflroy d'Anjou, 203, 211.
GeofTroy Gaimer, chronicles of, 32.

INDEX

391

Geoffrey III, Comte du Perche, 150, 222, 223.

Gesu, church of, at Rome, 34.

Gilbert de la Por6e, Bishop of Poitiers, 320,

321.
Gildas. (Sec Saint Gildas-de-Rhuys.)
Glass. (See Windows.)
God, definitions of:

by Saint Gregory the Great, 285.

by Bishop Hildebert of Le Mans, 285.

by Spinoza, 286.

by Saint Thomas Aquinas, 374-76.

the ultimate substance, or universe, 291,

292-94.
proofs of his existence, 324.
as conceived by Saint Francis, 343.
Godfrey of Bouillon, 287.
Godwin, Earl of VVessex, i8.
Golden Legend {Legenda Aurea), 87, 164, 259,

260, 261.
Good Samaritan window at Chartres, 165,

177, 180.
Gothic architecture:

its beginning and end, 10, 33, 34, 45, 57,

198, 202, 306.
its singularity, 89, 139.
its vaults and buttresses, 108, 109.
its apses, 114, 118-27.
{See Mont-Saint-Michel, Chartres, Ro-
manesque, Transition, etc.)
Graal, Conte du, 215-18.
Grace, doctrine of, 323, 376.
Greece, its influence on France, 139.
its coins, 196.
its architecture, 32, 34, 75.
its share in twelfth-century glass, 133-35.
its share in scholastic philosophy, 360.
{See Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Thomas
Aquinas, etc.)
Gregory the Great, Pope and Saint (540-

604) ; his definition of God, 285.
Greville, in Normandy, 5.
Grisaille, windows described by Viollet-le-
Duc, 158, 159.
at Chartres, 162, 165, 166, 177.
Gros Fillers, crypt at Mont-Saint-Michel, 11,

35-
Gueldres, battle-cry of, 94.
Guesclin, battle-cry of, 94.
Guienne (Acquitaine), Duchy of, 27. {See

Eleanor of Guienne.)
Guillaume. {See William.)

Guy of Amiens, Latin poem of, 21, 22.
Gyrth, brother of Harold, killed at Hastings,
24.

Haeckel, Professor Ernest, 321, 360.
Haimon, Abbot of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives,

103.
Hainault, province of Flanders, 94, 209.
Hales, Alexander, Doctor doctorum, 347, 349.
Halls in mediaeval architecture, 39-40, 118.
Harold the Saxon, Earl of Wessex, 5, 18; his

visit to Normandy, 18, 19, 23; at

Mont-Saint-Michel, 19, 23; his death,

24.
Hastings, battle at, 18, 20, 23, 24.
Haureau, B., Fhilosophie Scholastique, 320,

357-
Hauteville, near Coutances, 4.
Havise, Countess of Evreux, 209.
Helena, Empress, 74.

Heloise, wife of Abelard, 36, 220, 221, 249,
286, 287, 303.
established at the Paraclete, 309.
made Abbess of the Paraclete, 312.
letter of condolence from Peter the Ven-
erable, 317.
Henry of Anjou, King Henry H of England,
14, 35, 152.
marries Eleanor of Guienne, 210, 211,212.
Henry III, King of England (1216-72), 155.
Henry of France, monk at Clairvaux, 313.
Henry H, King of France (1547-59), 68.
Henry HI, King of France (1574-89), his

pilgrimages to Chartres, 256.
Henry IV, King of France (1589-1610), 256.
Heraclius, Emperor, 92.
Hermogenes, or Almogenes, magician, in
Saint James window at Chartres, 166,
167.
Herod, in Chartres windows, 136, 167.
Hildebert, Abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, 4, 6,

7, II.
Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans and Archbishop
of Tours (1055-1133), his definition of
God, 285, 300, 301.
Hobbes, Thomas, 379.
Holy Ghost, 97, 103.

in Chartres glass, 147, 183.
mystery of, 304, 305.
in Adam de Saint-Victor, 32'
Paraclete, 307, 312.

392

INDEX

Homer, 26.

Hugo, Archbishop of Rouen, letter on the re-
building of Chartres, 104.
Hugolino of Ostia, Cardinal, 342, 343.
Hume, David, 315.
Hurepel. {See Philip Hurepel.)
Huysmans, J. K., Tlie Cathedral, 76, 83-84.

lie de France, province between the Seine,

Marne, and Oise, 27, 56-61, 121.
Iliad, 345.
Illiers, Raoul de, his window at Chartres,

157.
Individualisation, principle of, 297, 360-62.
Ingres, 138.
Innocent II, Pope (113&-43), favours Ab^-

lard, 310-12.
condemns Abelard, 316, 317.
Innocent VI, Pope (1352-62), 349.
Isaac et Abraham, in the north porch of

Chartres Cathedral, 84, 117.
Isabel de Chartres, 203.
Isabel de Conches, in Normandy, 209.
Isabel de France. (See Saint Isabel.)
Isaiah, in Chartres window, 187.
Iseult, or Isolde, 50, 219, 220, 226, 287.
Issoire, church of, 119.
Ivanhoe, 217.

Jacobus de Massa, 339, 340.

Jacques de Voragine (Giacomo di Varaggio),
Bishop, his Legenda Aurea, 87, 164,
261.

James the Major, Saint lago di Compostella,
window at Chartres, 164-66.

Jarnac, coup de, 299.

Jean de Meung, 247, 249.

Jeanne d'Arc, 210, 246, 249, 341.

Jeanne de Dammartin, her window at Char-
tres, 155.

Jehanne, La belle, conte, 207-209.

Jeremiah, in Chartres window, 187.

Jerusalem, Henry of Champagne, King of,
223.

Jesuits, Societas Jesu, 286, 306, 349, 376.

Joachim, Saint, 79, 164.

John, Saint. (5ee Saint John, the Evangel-
ist.)

John XXII. Pope, 349.

John, King of England (1199-1216), 150,
152, 153, 224.

John I, Duke of Brittany, 189.

John of Gaunt, in Shakespeare's Richard II

256.
John of Salisbury', Bishop of Chartres (1176),

292, 311. 312, 322.
Joinville, Jean sire de, his chronicle, 227; his

education, 199; his religion, 253, 254;

his account of Queen Blanche, 186,

201, 202, 207; of court manners, 272.
Jongleur, joculator, 17-23, 231, 240, 262.
Jordan, Abbot. {See Mont-Saint-Michel.)
Jourdain, Charles, La Philosophie de Saint

Thomas d'Aquin, 361.
Justinian, Emperor (557), rebuilds the Church

of Sancta Sofia, 179.

Kilwardeby, Robert, Archbishop of Canter-
bury, 366.

Labarte, Jules, Histoire des Arts Industriels au

May en Age, 107.
La belle Jehanne, thirteenth-century novel,

207-09.
Lacroix, Paul, Le Moyen Ageet la Renaissance,

107.
Lady Chapels, 95.
La Marche, Count of, 189.
Lancelot, by Christian of Troyes, 215, 219,

221.
Laon, cathedral of (Notre Dame), 56, 59, loi,
116,321,334.
towers and fleches of, 47, 65, 66.
oxen of, loi.
apse of, 118, 123, 126.
western rose-window of, 115, 116.
Last Judgments, 71, 86, 332.

in western rose at Chartres, 144, 145.
Lasteyrie, Ferdinand de, Histoire de la Pein-

ture sur Verre, 129.
Latin Quarter of Paris, 174, 220, 275, 288.
Lazarus. (See Saint-Lazare.)
Legenda Aurea, by Jacques de Voragine. (See

Golden Legend.)
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 323.
Le Mans, cathedral of (Saint Julien), 60, 70.
apse of, 125, 126.
glass of, 136, 171.
window of Saint Protais, 260.
Bishop Hildebert of, 285.
Leo XIII, on Thomas Aquinas, 349.
Leonardo da Vinci, 67.

INDEX

393

Lescine, Nicolas, 172.
Lescot, Pierre, 42, 67.
Lessay church in Normandy, 10, 51-
Lincoln, battle of (1217), 153.
Lisbon earthquake, 370.
Littre, his dictionary, 9.
Loches, chateau of, 91.
Locke, John, 315.
Lohengrin, 77, loi.
Loire, architectural school of, 46, 60.
Louis VI (le Gros), King of France (1081-
1137), 74, 85, 156, 203 (genealogical
table), 288, 310, 312.
his death, 313.

his queen, Alix de Savoie, 74, 78, 203.
Louis VII (le Jeune), King of France (1120-
80), marries Eleanor of Guienne, 152,
203 (genealogical tables), 220.
divorced, 211, 212.

marries Alix de Champagne, 152 (genea-
logical table), 212.
his monastic tastes, 313.
at the Council of Sens to condemn Abd-
lard, 316.
Louis VIII (the Lion), King of France (1187
—1226), 78, 81, 85, 150, 151, 152, 158,
182.
marries Blanche of Castile, 224.
is invited to England by the barons, 153.
dies in 1226, 225.
Louis IX (Saint), King of France (1215-70),
42, 78, 81, 85, 151, 152 (genealogical ta-
ble), 155, 156, 158, 175, 182, 199, 225,
253, 254, 255, 273.
his crusade of 1248, 85, 157, 253, 254.
in glass at Chartres, 155.
in awe of his mother, 201.
his sense of humour, 253.
his relations with Thomas Aquinas, 347-

53-
Louis XI, King of France (1469), creates
Order of Saint Michael, I, 40.
builds Loches, 91.
restores civil order, 255.
Louis XIV, style of, 9, 42, 144, 221.
Louis XV, style of, 9.
Louis d'Orleans, builder of Pierrefonds, 42.
Louise de Lorraine, queen of Henry III of

France, 255.
Lourdes, Notre Dame de, 79, 106, 261, 276, 280.
Louvre, hall of Pierre Lescot, 42.

Macbeth, Lady, 209.

Magdalen. {See Saint Mary p^cheresse.)

Magna Carta, 151, 347.

Mahaut (Mathilde) de Boulogne, 8i, 82.

Mahaut (Mathilde) de Champagne, 150, 152.

Maine, Province of. (See Le Mans.)

Mai ardent, leprosy, 258.

Male, Em., L'Art religieux en France au XIII*

Steele, loi, 129, 168.
Manicheans, 348.
Mantes (Seine-et-Oise), death-place of King

William the Norman, 24, 55.
its church of Notre Dame, 55-59, 114,

214-

Marc, King, in the Roman of Tristan, 219,

226.
Margaret of Provence, queen of Louis IX,

Joinville's story of, 201, 207.
Marion el Robin, play of, 242-46.
Marly, Bouchard de, 158.
Marseilles, 207, 208.
Masseo of Marignano, 339, 340.
Mathematics, exercitium nefarium, 72, 289,

294.
Matilda of Flanders, Duchess of Normandy

and Queen of England (tii83), 12, 21,

203.
her marriages, 200.
Matter, its importance in theology, 297, 351,

359-64-
Matthew Paris, 156.
Melchisedec window at Chartres, 186.
M6nestrel de Rheims, 153.
Menestreus, menestrier, 17, 245, 262.
Mer\'eille, the. (See Mont-Saint-Michel.)
Michael, Archangel, patron saint of France, I.
202.

his day, October 16, 5, 15.

his power, I, 6.

his architecture, 8, 40-42, 351.

pilgrimages to shrine of, 15-18.

Order of Chevaliers of, I, 39, 40.

in the Chanson de Roland, 31.

at Chartres, 86, 134, 147, 161.
Michael Angelo, 67, 192, 382.
Michelet, Jules, history of France, 186.
Milky Way, 371 ; in window at Chartres, 169.
Milton, John, 30, 267, 356.
Minorites. {See Francis of Assisi.)
Miracles, of the lances, 170.

of the Virgin. {See Virgin.)

394

INDEX

Moissac, Abbey of (Tarn-et-Garonne), 6, 53,

70.
Moltere, 15.^
Molinier, Emile, Histoire Generale des Arts

Appliques (1896), 107.
•Money-changers and bankers, window at

Chartres, 181, 182.
Monreale, mosaics of, 180.

cathedral of, 4, 118.
Mont-Saint-Michel in periculo maris, I, 32.
Abbey church of, I, 5-10, 351.
triumphal columns, 2, 19.
tower lost, 10, 50.
choir, 10.
cr>'pt, II, 35-
pilgrimage to, 14-17, 74.
relation to the Chanson de Roland, 12, 22,

30, 31-
refectory of the eleventh century, 11, 12,

21, 36.
buildings of the twelfth century:

aquilon, 33, 34, 35, 70.

promenoir, 34, 36, 70.
buildings of the thirteenth century:

Mer\'eille, 11, 37-45, 91, 109.

refectorj' and hall, 38-43, 44.

charter-house, 42, 43.

cloisters, 39, 42, 43.

Belle Chaise entrance, 45.
chatelet of fourteenth century, 45.
Mont-Saint-Michel, Abbots of:

Hildebert II (1017-23), fourth Abbot,

4, 6, 7, 10, II.
Ralph de Beaumont (1048-60), eighth

Abbot, 12, 23.
Ranulph du Mont (1060-85), ninth

Abbot, 12.
Roger II (1106-23), eleventh Abbot, 33,

35. 36, 70.
Robert de Torigny (1154-86), fifteenth

Abbot, 7, 14, 15, 37, 44.
Jordan (1191-1212), seventeenth Abbot,

37. 38.
Pierre le Roy (1386-1410), twenty-
ninth Abbot, 45.

Mont-Saint-Michel, Roman du, by William
of St. Pair, 12-16, 37.

Montargis, chSteau de, 42.

Monte Cassino, 4, 347-48.

Montespan, Mme. de, 9.

Montfort I'Amaury, 156.

Montfort, Simon and Amaury, 156.
Montjoie, battle-cry of France, 25, 94.
Moret, a drink, 217.
Morigny, abbey of, 310.
Mougon, Reynaultde, Bishop of Chartres, 154.
Murano, church at, 118.
Murillo, painting of Saint Bernard, 93.
Mystics, French and Italian, loi, 332-46,
352, 377-

Naif, natif, 9, 11, 29, 30.
Naples, Norman conquest of, 4.
Nebuchadnezzar, in Chartres window, 186.
Necessitarianism of Ab61ard, 315, 321, 379.
Nervures, rib-vaulting, 35, 382.
New Alliance, the dependence of the new
dispensation on the old, windows at
Chartres, etc., 165, 167, 172, 176, 180,
187.
Newton, Sir Isaac, 323.
New York, towers of, 55.
Nicholas. (5ee Saint Nicholas.)
Nicolette. {See Aucassins.)
Nimbus, 74.
Nippur, 163.

Noah, window at Chartres, 180.
Nominalism, 294, 323, 353.

results in materialism, 302, 323.
Normandy, character and influence of, 2-10,
49. 54. 209, 214.

conquered by Roland, 27.

architecture of, 7, 10, 32, 54.

fleches of, 47-53-

conquered by Philip Augustus (1203), 37,

151-
outbreak of devotion to the Virgin, 50,

103. 321.
women of, 3.
Notre Dame. {See Virgin.)
Notre-Dame-de-la-Belle-Verri§re, window at

Chartres, 146, 148, 149.
Noyon, cathedral of (Notre Dame), 37, 56,
63, 91, 114, 214, 321.
transepts of, 118.
Noys, Thought, 357, 358.

Odo, brother of William the Conqueror, 23,

24, 28.
Oliphant, 26, 28, 171.
Oliver and Roland at Roncesvalles, 20, 24-26,

272, 336-

INDEX

395

Omar Khayydm, 307, s.sS, 381.

Ordcric, monk of Saint Evroul, his history of

Normandy, 202, 203, 209, 220.
Ottin, L., Le Vitrail, 129.
Ouistreham in Normandy, 10, 53.

Palermo, 4.

Pallet in Brittany, 288.

Pantheism, 286, 299, 301, 323, 344, 355, 376,

377-
Paraclete, Holy Ghost, the Consoler, 307.
Abelard's foundation near Nogent-sur-

Seine, 307, 318.
erected into a priory for Hfiloi'se, 310.
papal bull of 1 136 in its favour, 312.
Paradise, 144, 145, 232, 233, 279.
Paris, 36; in the time of Ab61ard, 288.
churches of, 60.
schools of, 286, 293.
cathedral of (Notre Dame), 56, 79, 102,

106, 114, 289.
its windows, 56, 57, 58, 114.
its apse, 119, 120, 126.
its sculptures, 70, 100, loi.
Paris, Gaston, his history of mediaeval French
literature, 205.
on Christian of Troyes, 214, 215, 220.
on Thibaut of Champagne, 227.
on Gaultier de Coincy, 258.
Parsifal, loi, 215-18.
Partenopcus of Blois, 207.
Parvis, small square in front of large church,

5.63.
Pascal, Blaise, 129, 352, 354, 377.

his Pensees, 323-25, 370.
Pascal III, antipope, canonises Charle-
magne, 168.
Pastrycooks' window at Chartres, 181.
Peasant, character of the French, 235, 237.
Perceval, Parsifal, Conle da Graal, by Chris-
tian of Troyes, 215-18.
Perche, Comte du, 211 ; his window at Char-
tres, 150-54. {See GeofTroi.)
Percherain, 150.
Percy, in Normandy, 5.
Peter. {See Saint.)

Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, 68, 309,
310, 317: his opinion of Saint Bernard,
317; of Ab61ard, 318, 319.
Petrarch, prayer to the Virgin, 251, 328.
his religion of women, 213, 219, 226.

Philip Augustus, King of France (i 180-1223),
78, 85, 116, 151, 154, 157, 171, 223,

231-
Philip Hurepel, son of Philip Augustus, 81-83,

85, 156, 182, 189, 190.
Philip the Fair, King of France (1285-1314),

88, 250, 253.
Philip the Hardy, King of France (1270-85),

63,78.
Philippe de Commines, 255.
Phocas, Emperor, 92.
Pierpont in Normandy, 5.
Pierre. {See Saint Peter.)
Pierre de Courtenay, 156.
Pierre le Venerable. {See Peter.)
Pierre de Dreux, Mauclerc, his porch at
Chartres, 85-88, 102, 128.

his rose-window, 117, 144, 182, 184-94.

his figure in glass, 189.

his rebellion, 81, 184, 186, 226, 275.

prisoner at Damietta, 253.
Pierre du Pallet. {See Abelard.)
Pierre de I'E^toile, journal of, 255.
Pierrefonds, chlteau of, 42.
Pilgrimages, 15-18.
Pisa, 214.

Placidas. {See Saint Eustace.)
Plato, 291, 293.
Poissy, abbey of, 42.

abbey church of, 59.
Poitiers, 63, 211.

church of Notre Dame la Grande, 53.

cathedral of (Saint Pierre), 63.

twelfth-century glass at, 136.

Bishop of, 320.

Raymond, Count of, 211.
Poitou, 27.
Ponthieu, County of, 19.

Count of, 155.

La Comtesse de, conte, 207, 209.
Porches and portals, 69-88.
Porphyry, his Preliminaries, 293, 300.
Port-Royal, 325.
Prison-song of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 222-

23-
Prodigal Son, 76, 77, 174, 175.

windows at Chartres, etc., 165, 173, 174,
175, 176, 181.
Provence, 27.

Provins, in Champagne, 227.
Pythagoras, 73.

396

INDEX

Queen of Sheba, 77, 83.
Quixote, Don, 213, 215.

Rafael Sanzio, 67.

Ralph de Beaumont, eighth Abbot of Mont-
Saint-Michel (1048-60), 12, 23.

Ralph, seigneur de Conches, 209.

Ranulph du Mont, ninth Abbot of Mont-
Saint-Michel, (1060-85), 12, 31.

Raoul de Cambrai, roman, 214.

Ravenna, 118, 130.

Raymond of Poitiers, 211.

Realism, 174, 294, 320.

results in pantheism, 299, 300, 323.

Reynault, or Renaud, de Mougon, Bishop of
Chartres, his window, 154, 168.

R6gnon, Th. de, S. J. Eludes sur la Sainte
Trinite, 306, 376.

R^musat, Charles de, his work on Ab61ard,
300.

Renaissance, the, 89.

Renan, Ernest, 354.

Averrois el I Averrcnsme, 140.

Renaud, Bishop of Chartres, 154. {See
Reynault.)

Rheims, cathedral of (Notre Dame), 49, 79,
80, 89, 91, 192, 225, 347, 350.
sculpture at, 83, 100.
height of vault, no.
rose-windows, 115.
twelfth-century glass, 137.

Rhine, architectural school of, 60.

Richard, Cceur-de-Lion, King of England
(1189-99), 150, 152, 203, 218, 222,

231-
his poetry, 14, 150, 222, 223.
his education, 199.
affianced to Alix de France, 212.
his death, 223, 231.
Richard I, sans-Peur, Duke of Normandy

(943-96), 4.
Richard II of Normandy (996-1026), 4, 51.
Richard de Saint-Victor, 326.
Robert of Artois, 242.
Robert Guiscard (1015-85), 4.
Robert de Beaumont, at Chartres, 158.
Robert of Torigny, fifteenth Abbot of Mont-
Saint-Michel (1154-86), 7, 14, 15, 37,

44-
Rohin el Marion, play of, 242-46.
Robin Hood, 218, 246.

Roger of Sicily, twelfth son of Tancred de

Hauteville (1031-1101), 4.
Roger II, King of Sicily, (i 101-54), 4-
Roger II, eleventh Abbot of Mont-Saint-
Michel (1106-23), 33- 35. 36, 70.
Roger of Wendover, 1 53.
Rohault de Fleury, his Iconographie de la

Sainte Vierge, 74, 91, 95.
Roland, prefect of the Breton marches, killed
at Roncesvalles (778), 5, 17-31.

Chanson de, 12, 17-31. 34. 233, 267,
272.

his relics, 27, 28.

at Chartres, 12, 168-72.

ideal hero of Saint Francis, 335, 336.
Roman, du Monl-Saint-Michel, 14-17.

de Rou, 18, 19.

Parlenopeus de Blois, 207.

de la Chareltc, 215, 221.

de la Rose, 242, 247-50.
Romanesque architecture of the eleventh cen-
tury, 6-13.
Rome, church of II Gesu, 34; St. Peter's, 67.

jealousy of, 95, 123.
Roncesvalles, 5, 20, 24, 30.
Rose motive in windows, 115.
Rose-\vindows, at Mantes, 55, 56, 114, 115.

at Amiens, 115.

at Paris, 56, 115.

at Beauvais, 116.

at Laon, 115.

at fetampes, 116. (See Chartres.)
Rotrou, Comte du Perche, 152.
Rouen, hall at, 42.

cathedral of (Notre Dame), 54, 91, 172.

abbey of Jumifeges, 53.
Rousselot, Xavier, Etudes sur la Philosophie,

320.
Runnimede, 151.
Rutebeuf, satirist, 254, 269.

Saint Anne (mother of the Virgin), at Char-
tres, 79, 83, 185-86, 191 ; her daughters,
164.

ApoUinaris, window at Chartres, 181.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 163, 184,
323, 342, 347, 350, 370, 373.

Bartholomew, massacre of, 255.

Basil, blood of, 27, 28.

Benedict, 31.

Benoit-sur-Loire, abbey church of, 5.

INDEX

397

Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 12, 34,

36, 49, 67, 68, 92, 106, 161, 163, 174,

281, 282, 320-22, 325; hymns to the

Virgin, 93, 96, 255, 257, 330; the-

ologist, 129, 320, 351; politician,

202, 204. {See Ab^lard, Gilbert de

la Porte, Bernard.)
Bonaventure, General of the Franciscan

Order, 353, 361.
Christopher, 50.
Denis, hair of, 27, 28.

seigneur of Roland, 27.

abbey church of, 34, 42, 169, 249, 313.

glass of Abb6 Suger, 129, 134-36, 146,
204. (See Suger.)

battle-cry of France, 34, 94.
Dominic. (See Dominic.)
£tienne, window at Chartres, 171, 177.

rose, in church at Beauvais, 116. (See
Abbaye-aux-Hommes, Bourges, and
Sens.)
Eustace, window of, at Chartres, 172-73,

180.
Ferdinand of Castile and Leon, 155, 182.

in glass at Chartres, 191 ; his genealogy,
203.
Francis of Assisi, 12, 92, 325.

his sermon to the birds, 44, 338, 339.

his birth, 334.

his Knights of the Round Table, 335.

his hatred of schools and scholars, 338,

342-44-

his Fiorelti, 164, 338.

his pantheism, 338-46.

his Cantico del Sole, 344-45.

his death, 334, 346.
Gabriel, archangel, 29, 73, 79, 134, 147.
Genevieve, hill of, 289.
George, statue at Chartres, 85, 86, 87.

window at Chartres, 183.
Germain at Auxerre, clocher, 65.
Germain-des-Pres, abbey church of, at

Paris, 59, 60, 288.
Gervais, clocher at Falaise, 53; Gervais

et Protais (martyrs), window to, at Le

Mans, 260.
Gildas-de-Rhuys, abbey in Brittany, 174,

309, 310, 318; elects Ab61ard as abbot,

309; treatment of Abelard, 31 1.
Gregory the Great, 285.
Hilary of Poitiers, 183.

Isabel of France, 83, 168.
James the Major (Santiago of Compos-
tella), 164; his window at Chartres,

165-67. 170-
James the Minor, 164.
Jerome, window of, at Chartres, 184.
Joachim, 79, 164.
John the Evangelist, 86, 164; his window

at Chartres, i8o; in the Rose de Dreux,

187.
Joseph, 73, 164, 176.
Jude, 164, 165.
Julien-le-Pauvre, church of, in Paris, 60,

288.
Lawrence, window at Chartres, 181.
Lazare, 29; cathedral at Autun, 71.
Leu d'Esserent (Oise), abbey church of,

58, 116, 214; fl^che of, 64.
Louis. (See Louis IX.)
Lubin, window of, at Chartres, 180, 183.
Lucien, abbey of Beauvais, 310.
Luke, in Chartres window, 187.

his prodigal son, 76, 174.
Mark, church of, at Venice, 6, 118.

in Chartres window, 187.
Martin of Tours, windows at Chartres,

172, 183.
Martin-des-Champs, church of, in Paris,

60; its apse, 119.
Mary. (See Virgin.)

Mary the Gipsy (p^cheresse), her win-
dow at Chartres, 176, 184.
Mary Magdalen (p^cheresse), her win-
dow at Chartres, 176, 180.
Matthew, in Chartres window, 187.
Maurice, cathedral of Angers, 116, 1361
Michael. (See Michael.)
Nicholas, 86; his windows at Chartres,

180, 183.
Pair, in Normandy, 14, 15, 17, 18.
Paul, 108, 187; window at Chartres, 163,

164, 165.
Peter, his attitude to the Virgin, 164;
tooth of, 27, 28;statueof, 76; window
at Chartres, 163, 164, 165, 184.

church of, sur Dives, fl^che at, 53, 103,
321.

church of, at Rome, 109.
Piat, chapel of, at Chartres, 160, 17 1,

172, 175-
Pierre (see Saint Peter), 94,

398

INDEX

Saint Protais, window of, at Le Mans, 260.
Romain, clocher of, at Rouen, 54, 55.
Sernin, church of, at Toulouse, 6.
Severin, church of, at Paris, 288.
Simeon, 73.

Simon and Saint Jude, 163, 164, 165.
Sofia, church of, at Constantinople, III,

118, 179, 192.
Stephen. (See fetienne.)
Sulpice, church of, at Paris, 34, no,

313-
Sylvestre and Melchiades, window of, at

Chartres, 154, 171, 172, 177-
Theodore, statue of, at Chartres, 87.
Thierry, abbey of, 313.
Thomas, apostle and martyr, his window

at Chartres, 171, 177.
Thomas A Becket, martyr, 176; window
at Chartres, 176, 177; his hair-shirt,
260.
Thomas Aquinas, doctor angelicus, 93,
106, 288; his works, 258; his birth and
career, 347-48;' at court of Saint
Louis, 348 ; his authority in the Church,
349; his church as architecture, 321,
322, 349-83-
Victor, cloister and school of, in Paris,
292, 322-32, 351 {see Adam de Saint-
Victor); murder of Prior in 1133, 311.
Sainte-Chapelle, at Paris, 154, 158, 247.
San Vitale, church of, at Ravenna, 118.
Sapphires, in glass, 135.
Satan. (See Adam.)
Scheherazade, 207.

Schools of Romanesque architecture, 60.
Schools and scholastic teaching, at Paris, 174,
176, 287-307, 338, 348, 369.
at Cologne, 347, 348.
Scott, Walter, 217, 279.

his translation of the Dies Irm, 331, 332.
Secqueville in Normandy, fleche of, 53, 65.
Senlis, cathedral of (Notre Dame), 59, 65, 214.
Sens, cathedral of (Saint-Etienne), its sculp-
tures, 70.
its glass, 173, 174, 180.
council at, in 1 140, condemns Ab61ard,
316, 318, 320.
Shakespeare, 113, 233, 236, 280; Much Ado
abotU Nothing, 207 ; Lady Macbeth, 209;
Henry VI, 256.
Sheba, Queen of, at Chartres, 83.

Shoemakers' window at Chartres, 172.
Sic et Nan, work by Ab61ard, 314.
Sicily, Norman conquest of, 4.
temples of, 32.
churches of, at Palermo, Monreale,

Cefalu, 179, 180.
Counts and Dukes of:
Roger I (1031-1101), 4.
Roger II (1097-1154), King of, 4.
William II (1166-87), 4.
Socrates, the scholastic individual, 291, 295,

298, 299, 357, 360.
Soissons, cathedral of (Saint-Gervais et
Saint- Protais), 37, 56, 118, 126, 321.
architects of, 51.

council of (1121), condemns Abdlard,
306, 316.
Solomon window at Chartres, 186.
Sorbonne, school of theology in Paris, founded

in 1253, 353.
Spinoza, Benedict, his definition of God, 286,

321, 323, 351- 360.
Stratford atte bowe, 3.
Statuary, a mark of the Virgin's churches, 100.
Stella Maris, 330.

Substance, sub-stans, that which stands be-
hind or under the phenomenon; das
Ding an sich, 291, 295, 320.
Suger, Abbot of Saint-Denis (1122-52), 35,
68, 307-
rebuilds the Abbey of Saint-Denis, 313.
his glass, 129, 134-36. 144. 146-
his political influence, 202, 210, 308, 313.
Syllogisms, 141, 290.

rejected by Bacon, 315, 341.
Synagogue, symbol in art, 102, 175, 187.

Taillefer, Incisor-ferri, Duke William's jong-
leur, 20-26, 31, 34.
Tailors' window at Chartres, 166.
Tancred of Hauteville, 4.
Tanners' windows at Chartres and Bourges,

1 72.. 1 73-74-
Tempier, Etienne, Bishop of Paris, 366.

his Merlin.
Tennyson, Alfred, 241, 338; 205.
Thaon, church in Normandy, 10, 52.
Theocritus, 338.
Theophilus, miracle of, 280.
Thibaut, Count of Champagne (ti20i), 152,

203, 223.

INDEX

399

le Grand, Count of Champagne (1201-
53). 152 (genealogical table), 203
(genealogical table), 224, 225, 231, 246.

the friend of Queen Blanche, 189, 190,
224, 225, 226.

affianced to Yolande of Brittany, 189,

253-
his poems, 227-29.

Count of Chartres (tii97), 152 (gene-
alogical table), 203 (genealogical table),
211, 212.
VI of Chartres (ti2i8), le Jeune, ou le
Lepreux, 150, 151, 152, 154, 181,
203 (genealogical table).
Thomas Aquinas, doctor angelicus, saint, 57,
93, 106, 315.
his birth, 164, 288, 338, 347.
his death, 366.

his training and character, 348.
at court of Louis IX, 348.
his works, 258, 348-49.
his church as architecture, 350.
its Norman foundation, 351.
his demonstration of God, 352.
his definition of the Trinity, 355.
his doctrine of Creation, 356-59.
his doctrine of Individualisation, 360-62.
his doctrine of free-will and grace, 369.
Thomas of Le Perche, Count, 151-52 (gene-
alogical table); killed at Lincoln, 150-
54; his window at Chartres, 150, 154.
Thomas Cantimpratensis, canon of the Abbey

of Cantimpr6, 330.
Time, in the Roman de la Rose, 248-49.

in theolog>', 358.
Tombeor de Notre Dame, 281-84.
Torcello, 118, 194.
Torigny, Abbot Robert of, 7.
Tortosa in Syria, miracle at, 254.
Toulouse, 223, 225; church of Saint-Sernin,

6, 119.
Tours, cathedral of (Saint-Gatian):
glass in, 166, 193.

men of, give window at Chartres, 181.
Towers, clochers and filches:
in Normandy, 6, 10, 48-52.
at Bayeux, 7, 51, 53.
at Boscherville, 53.
at Caen, 49, 52. 53.
at C^risy-la-Foret, 10, 51.
at Coutances, 47-53.

at Falaise, 53, 54.

at Jumifiges, 53.

at Lessay, 51.

at Rouen, 54.

at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, 53, 321.

at Secqueville, 53.

at Thaon, 52.

at Vacuelles, 54.

in the Isle de France, 47, 48, 54, 58.

at Saint-Leu-d'Elsserent, 58, 59.

at Senlis, 59.

at Saint-Denis, 58, 313.

in the Chartrain. {See Chartres.)

at Fenioux, 48.
in New York. 55.
Trajan, 172.
Transition, the French, 33, 34, 35, 57, 94,

321.
Tree of Jesse window at Chartres, 129-34.
Trent, Council of, 349.
Tresca, thirteenth-century dance, 242-45.
Triangle, mystic, 102, 296-99, 301-02, 355,

356.
Trianon, 144.
Triclinium, 97, 330.
Trinity, the, at Mont-Saint-Michel, 8.
in the Chanson de Roland, 29.
at Chartres, 79, 102.
overshadowed by the Virgin, 91, 99, 102,

143-
mystery of, 179, 183, 295-96, 302.
defined by Thomas Aquinas, 355.
immutable in law, 252, 262, 263.
dependent on the Virgin, 254, 262, 265,

273-
in essence Unity, 263.
its philosophical value, 304-305, 320.
in Egypt, 179, 304.
in the verses of Adam de Saint-Victor,

326.
in the Church fabric, 350, 354.
Tristan and Isolde, 50, 77, 214, 219, 220,

221.
Trouv^res, poetry of, 140.
Troyes, 214, 221, 227, 307, 308.
Truie qui file, 128.
Trumeau, 81. 86, 88.

Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, 24, 170; his
death at Roncesvalles, 26; his Chron-
icle, 168.
Tutbury Abbey, 103.

400

INDEX

Ugolino, Cardinal (Pope Gregory IX), 342,

343-
Ugolino, Franciscan monk, 339.
Unity {see Trinity), 301-302, 323. 351-69-
Universals, doctrine of, 291-300, 364.

Valois kings of France (1328-1589), 84.
Vaucelles, central tower of church at Caen,

52, 54; suburb of Caen, 200.
Vaulting, 109, 120-26, 356, 367.
Vendome, fleche of, 52, 64.

twelfth-century glass at, 137.
chapel of, at Chartres, 148, 181.
Venice, San Marco, 6.
Verlaine, 14.

Versailles, Salle des Glaces, 42; queen's apart-
ments, 91.
Vexin, French county, 5.
V^zelay, abbey of, 6, 42, 70; apse of, 120,

214.
Villard de Honnecourt, thirteenth-century
architect, his notes on Chartres and
Laon, 66, 116, 141, 351.
Villon, his Ballade des Dames, 249.
VioUet-le-Duc, Dictionary of French Archi-
tecture, 38, 42, 43, 117; of Mobilier,
107.
remarks on Coutances, 47, 49, 50.
on Thaon, 52, 53.
on Rouen, 53, 367.
on Mantes, 56, 57.
on Vendome, 64.

on the old tower at Chartres, 64, 65, 66.
at Clermont, 67, 68.
on the Chartres porches, 77, 80.
on the Chartres structure, ill.
on the Chartres fenestration, 114, 1 16.
on apses, 118-127.
on glass, 129-33, 165; on grisaille, 159,

183.
Virgin, of Chartres:

of the crypt, 1, 255.

of the Belle Verriere, 148.

of the Pillar, 146.

of France and of Dreux, 185-90.

always the Virgin of Majesty, 72-79,

84-88, 107-109, 134, 148.
coronation of, 78.
court of, 83, 182-97.
authority of, 260, 262, 265, 271, 273, 275,

276, 367-

character and tastes of, 12, 90, 96, 97,
103, 107, 176, 182, 183, 205, 213, 251-

73-
illogical by essence, 261-77, 341.
Virgin, Miracles of, 69, 103, 181, 251-84.
at Tortosa, 254.
at Chartres, 258.
for Saint Thomas of Canterbury, 259,

260.
at Le Mans, 260.
for her Son, 262.

against Church discipline, 263, 264.
for chevaliers, 266-71.
against the decisions of the Trinity, 265,

272-73-
for her Tombeor, 281-84.
for Adam de Saint-Victor, 330.
Virgin, of Majesty: at Byzantium, 91.

in the western portal of Chartres, 72-79,

145-

on the porches at Chartres, 81-85, 93-

in twelfth-century glass, 134, 145-46.

in thirteenth-century glass, 145, 147, 180.

in fifteenth-century glass, 148, 181.
Virgin, of Theology, 73, 83, 102, 262.

as understood by Saint Bernard, 92, 96,
202.

by Ab61ard, 257.

by Albertus Magnus, 93.

by Adam de Saint- Victor, 96, 330-33-

the religion of love, 325.
Virgin, of twelfth- and thirteenth-century
society:

battle-cries of, 34, 94.

in the game of chess, 204-205.

palaces of, 91 ; their money-cost, 94-99.

poetry of. {See Abelard, Saint Bernard,
Gaultier de Coincy, Adam de Saint-
Victor, Rutebeuf.)

symbol of, the rose, 1 12, 115.

her family connection, 164, 165.

her presence assumed, 105-12, 117, 121,
145, 182-97, 251-54.
Voltaire, 14, 107, 322, 370.

Wace, his Roman de Ron, 17, 18, 19, 214.
his account of the battle of Hastings, 20,
22.
Wagner, Richard, his Tristan, 219.
Water-carriers' window at Chartres, 180-81.
Westlake's History of Design, 129.

INDEX

401

William, the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy,
^,5,8,12,15,18, 19.31. 200,203,285;
his conquest of England, 2, 4, 8, 20, 23;
his death at Mantes, 55.

William Rufus, King of England, Duke of
Normandy, 202.

William II, King of Sicily (1166-89), 4-

William of Champeaux, Bishop of Chalons,
286, 290-303. 326, 352, 360, 361.

William of Loris, his Roman de la Rose, 231,
233. 247-50, 253.

William of Malmesbury, 21.

William of Saint-Pair, his Roman du Mont-
Saint-Michel, 14-18, 37, 43, 214.

William of Saint-Thierry, Abbot, his charges

against AbSlard, 313.
Windows, French books on, 129; glass at
Chartres, 128.
of twelfth century, 129-43.
of thirteenth century, 142-78.
of fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 193.
Women of the twelfth and thirteenth cen-
turies, 76, 81-83, 100, 198-229.
Wordsworth, 2, 89, 90.

Yolande of Brittany, 155, 189, 253.

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